True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

Music is really driving my whole life.

Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Whatever that means, however you got on that mountain, why not try to climb it? And do it in your own way.

I always loved advertising. If I hadn’t been in fashion, I’d have been in advertising.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

I don’t believe you could be a 39-year-old quarterback in the NFL and eat cheeseburgers every day. I want to be able to do what I love to do for a long time.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

Life loves the liver of it.

We all gonna die eventually from something or other, but don’t be a wimp. Put up a good fight.

A lot of people can’t stand touring but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

In my heart, I am always a Raider.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Virtuous people often revenge themselves for the constraints to which they submit by the boredom which they inspire.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

Every day, the people I meet inspire me… every day, they make me proud… every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Keep a good attitude and do the right thing even when it’s hard. When you do that you are passing the test. And God promises you your marked moments are on their way.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

The Paralympic Games is about transforming our perception of the world.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

We represent a hustler. I think we represent inspiration. I think we represent, you know, staying down. I think we represent building yourself up from the bootstraps.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.