I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
Going home helps the content.
I don't know where my ideas come from. I will admit, however, that one key ingredient is caffeine. I get a couple cups of coffee into me and weird things just start to happen.
For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.
This is my home. Home is where the disease is. As long as I stay in America, I'll never run out of subjects for songs.
What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.
The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer's drug, but I'm glad that's been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.
I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.
I'm working when I'm fighting with my wife. I constantly ask myself-how can I use this stuff to literary advantage.
Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about...)
My life has been wild enough to derive all of the stories you need out of it. I've been through many, many years of behavioral problems, so I don't really look outside for stories.
People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off.
For me, books are music for my mind and my imagination. When I am stuck in something I'm writing, I simply read my way out of being stuck. You can never waste time reading.
I don't think I could ever give up music. It's what makes me tick. If there was no music, there would be no writing.
Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.
It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?" "Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.
It's starting to feel good, although I don't like feeling too good - that's not where my comedy comes from.
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
When you're not writing, you're not doing anything else either because everything you do goes into the writing.
I never regret things. It's a really dangerous thing to say, but for anyone involved in the arts, the bad things that happen make for good material. It's not a comfortable truth, but it is true.
True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.
