We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

I’m much more comfortable and confident running out on the field in front of 70,000 people instead of standing in front of a camera trying to say some lines. The people who do that as a profession are very talented because it’s certainly not easy.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

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.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

I hate the idea of genres.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

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

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

I’ve never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves – it’s just a question of finding the subject.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

I think being able to age gracefully is a very important talent. It is too late for me.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

I’m a painter in sound.