Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

In the Raphael Room, the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in my ability to appreciate art.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

It’s not a science when you are judging art, but we’d be remiss to say you can’t look at something and say, ‚This is more well done than that.‘

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

I used to write random little stupid things when I was five, but then the first song I really wrote was one called ‚Fingers Crossed,‘ which is on SoundCloud.

There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I’ll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

I just want to keep writing music.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

I love to take, process and share photos – it fills me up.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.