Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

Imagination decides everything.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

I sell escapism.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

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.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

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.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

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.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

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

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

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

No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn’t sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours‘ writing. Nothing.

I am alone a lot, which is good. I need that time to just be alone after a long day, just decompress. So, I go to either my house or the hotel, or my apartment, or whatever – wherever I am, I go home and I watch TV and I sit there, with my cat, and I just watch TV or go online, check my emails.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

You fail only if you stop writing.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

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

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.