We must use time creatively.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Delay is preferable to error.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

Life well spent is long.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

I don’t do meetings.

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don’t have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

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

Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‚to do‘ list.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

All art is but imitation of nature.

My goals are so high that I don’t have time to relax in any way, shape or form.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

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

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I saw a bank that said ’24 Hour Banking‘, but I don’t have that much time.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘