I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

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.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

There are so many memories for me in Manchester. Everywhere I go, I think, ‚I used to have boutiques here, clubs there, restaurants in that area.‘

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

I am the freest author in the world.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

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.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

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!

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

I don’t do research. I never have.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

Think off-center.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

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

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.