There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

I enjoy wearing pins, and nobody tells me to do it.

The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Imagination decides everything.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

When you have nothing important or interesting to say, don’t let anyone persuade you to say it.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man – they’ve always been a threat to me.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

I want the world to see my body.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

I’m not a person who defends myself very often. I kind of let my actions speak for me.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

I never played with anything like toys.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

‚Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age‘ was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

In a disordered mind, as in a disordered body, soundness of health is impossible.

I did suffer a lot since karting, with my size and everything, not really having a clue what to do when I started karting. So I suffered in every category: F4, F3, F2. Not so much F2 but I’ve had to kind of play catch-up quite a bit and in some ways, F1 was a bit nicer with power steering.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.