I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

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

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.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

I’m a painter in sound.

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 look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

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

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down.

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.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

My imagination is a twisted place.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

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.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

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

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we’re a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn’t being ironic.

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

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

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

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Music is always a commentary on society.

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

Because you have things like ‚American Idol‘ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

There’s always gonna be rock n‘ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n‘ roll records, and there will always be rock n‘ roll.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I draw from the crowd a lot.