Sometimes, thinking on your feet can be the most creative. Constrained circumstances can bring the best out of you. Some of the most successful shows come out of shoestring invention.

Most young people haven't used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.

I don't consciously do anything to maintain a unique voice.

In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.

Why an artist loves what they do is often so hard to describe.

It's funny, though, with films, because you can incorporate a variety of elements, and sometimes that can work for you and sometimes I think it can work against you.

There comes a point in any project where you have to say - whether you like or understand the character, or the whole play for that matter - 'I believe!'

Because art as a pursuit, as a concept, as an ideal, constantly elevates one above the pragmatic, one is inclined to discuss art in heightened terminologies. For me, it is just what I do all day long.

I've made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I've made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I'm proud of what I've done. In fact, it's been a...

If my characters travel somewhere, I generally write about a place I know to give the scenes more authenticity.

Die a Happy Man was one of those that, when I wrote it and sent it to my label, their response was, This is a career record. I was like, Why do you think that? I think the stars aligned.

I try to write something that has a common ground to everyone. But there's been nothing new in music since Bach; he put every note in the world on a piece of paper.

I can only speak for myself and my own music, because that is what I am most familiar with, and I write about things that I am living or experiencing.

I'm eager to find the perfect film to shoot during my hiatus from 'Suits'.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.

We sit in a room, laugh, and all come up with comedy situations, which we work out. Sometimes we cross the line, like getting a guy to pull out of his own wedding while the ceremony's taking place.

Being a rather second-rate actress, I finally thought, 'I'd rather be a designer.' I knew I could make things look good.

Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.

I've been building scratch cars my whole life - my passion is taking something that doesn't exist, creating a concept on a blank piece of paper and making that concept real.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

I'm constantly making exhibitions in my head.

There's pressure to come up with something genius every time. I feel like I keep letting myself down with my Twitter posts. I have to start keeping a journal of rough drafts of prophetic ideas about...

I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!

I started writing once I got the ukulele.

Television used to be made much more in a vacuum; the only feedback the audience had for a long time was in a Nielsen number that would arrive sometime after the show had been broadcast. And now,...

If you're not doing something different, you're not doing anything.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

Making a movie like 'Felony' is hard work because you're really putting your own ideas on the screen. You can't hide behind some other person's script; you're saying, 'This is my brain, and I want you...

If you are still thinking about a script after five or ten years, that's a sign that it's good - not that it's stale. And the opposite is true - if everyone wants to make your movie, that's a sign...