Jonathan Swift Quotes

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

I think the older I get the more creative I get, I don't have the distractions that I had when I was younger.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

There's nothing more stressful than your stomach growling. But interestingly enough, some of my best writing came when I was poor and hungry - living off water and oatmeal, mind clear.

It's a humbling and amazing journey when you write a song in your bedroom, and you've got no money, and you're trying to write a song based on where you're at right at this moment.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

I'm 44 now; I feel better than I did when I was 34. I've got more clarity now. I wake up in the morning, and I write my blog, and then I go upstairs, and I work on music. And I do that every day. That's what I do. I don't check in once a week and think, "Oh, I've gotta come up with something now." I'm always writing. I was just in a coffee shop in Chelsea last night, just killing time, waiting for a friend, and I sat and wrote enough for three good songs. I love it. This is my life. It's all I do.

I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

Friends open the door for me to write. Then I get paid attention to and it allows me to write other books. The Great Spring and the thirtieth anniversary of Bones just came out and while I'm happy and excited about that, I've already finished a new book. That's what practice does. You don't get caught.

Common observation and a plain understanding is the source of all art.

I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer.

Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.

I've never learned to drive because I get lots of ideas when I'm a passenger in a car. I love to get in a car with a driver and just think and work things out.

It’s interesting that most gadgets are called ‘iPhone’ and ‘iPod,’ with that ‘i’ prefix, which is ego. But most creativity is not ego-led – a lot of it comes from the unconscious. So if you’re always checking your email or updating your Instagram profile, you’re not just looking out the window, daydreaming. You’ve got to let the subconscious in – that’s my main message to the world.

Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.

... Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs.

Okay, everyone please be completely quiet, because I can literally hear a whisper, and it’ll throw off my stream of consciousness, and when I get my stream of consciousness going that’s when I give the best, illest quotes. Literally, a whisper can throw it off.

I used to try to write a song a day. I've been so busy lately.

A lot of times I'll doodle on something while I'm doing interviews, because sometimes I'm on the phone for three or four hours and I want to get something going. I'll just start from a scribble, or something that someone else already put on the page.

How well I would write if I were not here!