When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

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.

I create stars.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

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.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

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

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

I’m glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me ‚Jackie Who?‘.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

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

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

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 is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn’t refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

I always like to create things that get attention. It used to be a problem when I wasn’t famous. Now, I can do whatever I want and people have to accept it.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.