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

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

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 often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

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.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

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

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

My theory on housework is, if the item doesn’t multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

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

I’m an inventor.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

We all knew this. We all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

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

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.