Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a ‚Tomb Raider,‘ has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. It’s like therapy.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

I’d like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‚Automobile Magazine.‘ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

I’d always tried to resist playing the supervirility thing. I liked showing the vulnerability of age.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

All of my writing is God-given.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

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

I am not a consecutive writer.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

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.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Everyone has their style and your style explains a lot about who you are – you feel me? I’ve had style since childhood, so I like to dress how I feel. But maybe I get carried away by some trends.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

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

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Therapy? I don’t need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

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

Writing bores me so.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.