“You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.”

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

Television is very dangerous. Because it repeats and repeats and repeats our disasters, instead of our triumphs.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

All education is self-discovery.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

The local TV news is the greatest danger in your life. It’s all crap.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.

Get rid of those friends of yours who make fun of you and don’t believe in you. And when you leave here tonight, go home, make a phone call and fire them. Anyone that doesn’t believe in you and your future, to hell with them.

Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

Neighbourliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves.

You will find Goodness and Truth everywhere you go. If you have to choose, choose Truth. For that is closest to Earth. Keep close to the Earth, in that lies strength. Simplicity of heart is just as necessary for an architect as for a farmer or a minister if the architect is going to build great buildings.

Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.

I’m hopeless with money; I simply spend what I’ve got.

I am a minimalist. I like saying the most with the least.

Money is never to be squandered or spent ostentatiously. Some of the greatest people in history have lived lives of the greatest simplicity.

Simplicity and Repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.