You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

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.

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.

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.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

I’m not ashamed to say I fear something.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

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.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

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.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

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.

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.

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.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

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.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

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

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.

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.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

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

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometime. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

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.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

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

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.