You can write songs about your comic books and the girl or boy you sort of know and your mom and dad and it's all right there in front of you.

I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, 'Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?' It’s just a painting.

Writing should be like skirts. Long enough to cover what it needs to cover and short enough to maintain interest.

Samuel Clemens isn't Mark Twain. Mark Twain is Mark Twain. He doesn't become the thing until he creates himself.

I have no interest in being a trained ballerina. People should dance how they want to dance. I want to be the funky chicken.

We like something because someone else liked it.

It's like that where these little anecdotes come through, and I guess that's what I like about books like that [He Stopped Loving Her Today]. Fiction now is so experiential.

The things that I have loved have always been those extremes where there has been some kind of apocalypse in the person's life, and they come out unscathed or scathed.

So much of our culture is bought and manufactured - not to say great art can't come out of that. Some art is really amazing that is manufactured and sold, like action movies and stuff.

I guess the things I have always loved are from people who were just being themselves. They were doing these things because they couldn't do it any other way. It was for them.

I think maybe it's my personality. People don't like my face.

We live like sheep in line waiting to be slaughtered in a slaughterhouse. We eat and laugh and fight as we see those in front of us fall to the knife

If you want to save your time, learn to be focused on your purpose to the utmost.

Chic Murray once told me he fell in the street, and a woman said to him, "Did you fall?" He said, "No, I'm tryin' to break a bar of chocolate in my back pocket."

The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue complete.

I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.

It has always been my rule in business to make everything count.

Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.

It seems to me to be important to distinguish a good idea from poor implementations of it

I’m so confused it almost feels calm.

The greatest of all mysteries is the man himself.