Sometimes I'll get a burst when I write lyrics, it usually happens in 20 minutes and I'll write the whole song, and that's really the only way it feels comfortable.
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
It is not that I am so clever; it is that everyone else is so stupid.
No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.
Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.
I've never really had a relationship with Hollywood. I've never had a desire to work there.
No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.