Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

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

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

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

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

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

The best football is always about expression of emotion. Always.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

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.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

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

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

American stuntmen are smart – they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance… But in Hong Kong, we don’t know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you’ve got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

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.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

In truth, I did enjoy the benefits of a Harvard connection.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

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.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.