“Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.”

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.

I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes

I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…

It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Poetry is a very complex art, It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Rap is really just too conventional. Everybody does the same thing. No one ever pushes the box.

I think it’s ridiculous that you need to look a certain way to be conventionally pretty.

A guy walks into a psychologist’s convention with a banana in his pocket.When asked about the significance of this he says;well,they were all out of grapes.

How crazy it is to define your happiness with hypocrisy-laced conventions? To always go with the flow and not letting the craziness show. Looks like the only sanity is to LET GO.

Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.