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 learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

My favorite movies of all times is ‚Doctor Zhivago,‘ and I love ‚Gone With the Wind.‘ I’d love to play some Southern belle or something where I owned a plantation.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

I always play women I would date.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

When I got into this, I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me, I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

People need to be insured so when you have an accident out there, or when something catastrophic happens to you, that you’re covered and there’s not someone else has to pay for you. That is as simple as that.

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.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

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.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Few people have the imagination for reality.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

You fail only if you stop writing.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

The goal for me is always to have the opportunity to work in different genres. This is a great and exciting time in my career, where I can have the opportunity to work in different genres, and also I recognize there’s not a lot of actors who have that opportunity and I’m grateful for it.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

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

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

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

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.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

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

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.