“Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.”

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Everything is politics.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

I’m a creative guy, artistically with graphics.

Well, predominately, if I’m writing for another artist, I’m sitting there with them and we’re writing it together.

I try not to think retrospectively. It’s important, as an artist, to look forward, always. I do try to take work that involves some challenge. If you approach a piece of work and you’re going, “Yeah, yeah, I can do that,” then that’s kind of a red flag.

You stand your ground and you perform your art. That’s what the artist does. The artist is about perfection.

My mom was real into like a lot of different musical artists, real artists, even back when Jay-Z and Beyonce was together.

I’m really an artist. I really do this. I don’t need the money. It doesn’t matter to me.

No artist that beefs with me or talks down on my name has that many platinum songs. They’re all gold.