“Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.”

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.

I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.

How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god,’ so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.

The Fates guide those who will and drag those who won’t!

Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.

The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.

Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.

Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.

Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.

You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.

The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist.

If you follow your bliss…the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet, because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll sort of be alright.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

I feel it’s my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

The pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.”

I listen to different artists. I open my mind to different artists.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.