I absolutely don’t believe in doing … focus groups and all that shit. Proctor and Gamble-style, no risk. Just do it

Perfection is always a desired goal, but it cannot be a primary goal. Expression has to be the primary goal, because otherwise, there is no need for an actual person to be there.

But my own mottos are, “Don’t imagine for a moment that you’re going to be able to express yourself.” ... And most aspiring artists think, “I have something to say.”

There are a few things I dismiss and a few I believe in thoroughly. The former include economic forecasts, which I think don't add value, and the list of the latter starts with cycles and the need to prepare for them.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor. […] As anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There’s a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.

I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.

As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity.