You are remembered for the rules you break.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.

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.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

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

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

The artist in me cries out for design.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

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

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

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.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

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

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

Never regret what you don’t write.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

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

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

I like to be creative.

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

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of ‚Hitchhiker’s,‘ and I thought, ‚No, no.‘ I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.