Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn't make it productive or worthwhile.
When I was done with the movie [Ordinary World], I felt really compelled to start working on another album. Little did I know, they were going to come out back to back.
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.
Through great input you get great output.
I don't have the patience to be a non-creator.
When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.
Nothing can come of nothing; he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.
A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.
I almost think of nerd brains as rattlesnake venom; like, you can milk it. You can milk the pulpy venom out of the nerd brain and use it for good if you want to.
I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.
There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs.
Work is rich. It can be looked at psychologically or philosophically or personally. The interpretive nature of work is different than the work itself. The interpretation of work isn't the key to understanding it. I'm worried about making a good sculpture. I'm not so worried about the interpretation of it.
The world doesn't pay you for what you know, it pays you for what you do.
I think we have a creative impulse where suffering can magnify our work, but so can joy. You can be in love and write the greatest love song ever. Sometimes I think too much suffering makes it difficult to do one's work.
I want to do more TV and more books. I want to have my hand in different projects. I'm way too hyper; I'm just one of those people who has to have a lot going on.
belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production
I tend to be an all-in-type of guy, so I get in a zone to write, and then that's all I do. I'll spend eight hours doing nothing but chasing that one song. That's what works for me.
