“And least of all – which is so important, too – to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force…When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.”

Don’t die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be. You may go broke. You may experience failure and rejection repeatedly. You may endure multiple dysfunctional relationships. But these are all milestones along the path of a life lived courageously.

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth.

Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o’clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve.

Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.

We’re telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected and has exactly the same feeling. This is the whole secret of enchantment and fascination.

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

When Culture Club broke up, I hadn’t been going out a lot because we’d been working all the time, so I suddenly had this period of leisure. And it was just around the time that the whole acid house thing kicked off in London.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.

If we don’t act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.