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

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.

I find a lot of inspiration through visuals. When I was 12, I saw Aurora’s ‚Runaway‘ music video. Something inside me clicked, like, ‚That is what I want to do, no matter whether it goes anywhere or not.‘

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

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

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

I am the freest author in the world.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

A lot of the stuff I do in terms of PR, I learned it from Muhammad Ali.

Every day is a gift from God. There’s no guarantee of tomorrow, so that tells me to see the good in this day to make the most of it.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

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.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

You get to a point where it’s like you can’t really do anything right, and people will pick on you for whatever decisions you make, so I just try and take no notice and get on with my music.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

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 decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

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

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.

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.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that’s what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.

How I love David Bowie.

It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn’t mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

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. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

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

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.