“It’s impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It’s the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.”

My life isn’t necessarily more important than anyone else’s: I’m just better in talking about it.

Your misery is everyone else’s entertainment.

I think I’d been limiting myself in some ways just writing in first person all the time.

We waste a lot of our lives sometimes. There are people sitting across from us who would make the whole world better if we spent more time with them in it, but we can’t get across that gully.

You don’t understand what makes you understand what makes your life better until you take something that makes it so much worse and you embrace that.

When so much money is involved in these movies, someone somewhere is going to try to screw you.

But what you realise after you’ve been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don’t have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

I can’t remember all the times I’ve tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

Bravery is what you can do in the face of things that hurt and scare you, but you do it anyway.

Eventually, they’ll just go away, because you will make them sad. That’s something I’ve proven quite adept at doing over the years.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn’t mean you’re fantastic.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.

For all the things I’m losing I might aswell resign myself to try and make a change.

Creativity is people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.

Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.

As a rule I don’t like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.

Ingenuity requires creativity.

To me, creatively challenging myself is my version of owning the Nets.

What is the worst is a fashion designer who talks all the time of his or her creativity, what they are, how they evolved. Just do it and shut up.