Creativity is just connecting things.
For eight years, I was sleeping with the president, and if that doesn't give you special access, I don't know what does!
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.
If you really don't know where to start or if you're stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.
Love crosses all boundaries.
What we're always looking for is weird social issues and weird connections to make. Luckily for them, there's no shortage of material.
What do I care if someone doesn't like me. If I like someone other people hate, it makes me feel special. I think my fans feel that way.
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
So I think rather than being attracted so much now to working with my heroes, I'm sort of more attracted to working with completely unlikely strangers because it's more exciting really.
If somebody would come and they're not playing music, they would encounter certain people on another level.
The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else.
Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.
'Humans of New York' is basically somebody walking up to absolute strangers on the street every day and, within minutes, talking with them about very personal things. Some things they haven't even told their best friends or family members.
But Tammy Faye calls me, and Ron Jeremy calls me, Erik Estrada sends me a Christmas card every year.
Unrelated doesn't necessarily mean unrelated. Allow ideas to dwell with one another.
There's something fascinating about seeing something you don't like at first but directly know you will love—in time. People are that way, all through life. You come against a personality, and it questions yours. You shy away but know there are gratifying secrets there, and the half-open door is often more exciting than the wide.
You don't have to stay in your lane when it comes to friendship or ideas.
My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.
For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.
I get very close to people when I'm shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob's office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.
I follow the most random people on Twitter. I follow famous people like Khloe Kardashian, who surprisingly makes really funny tweets all the time.
Relationships dont always make sense. Especially from the outside
There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.
I never would have thought I would be able to learn as much as I did from Blake Shelton, so I want to open up the doors to working with people that might not make sense on paper, collaborating with different artists like that, because you can never stop learning. That's the most important thing.
