I've got quite a vivid imagination and I'm easily overwhelmed by sensations and things that are beautiful or scary. I don't think I've ever seen a ghost - I think I'm probably haunted by my own ghosts than real ones.

I'm a light sleeper. I've never been one of those people who can put their head down and suddenly everything disappears. Nighttime is the time I get most scared, anxious or worried. In those darker moments before waking or sleeping is when I feel most, I don't know, I can turn on myself, and my imagination can take me dark places.

I've always been a bit of a decorator. I think if I wasn't a singer I'd probably be in stage setting or interior design or something. I like clutter and I'm quite visually greedy. I can't have things to be plain; I have to have things looking interesting... maybe I'm just a frustrated interior designer stuck in a singing career.

A lot of people are intimated by art, but it's something to be revered beyond criticism.

Just because it's been around for centuries, doesn't mean it's cool to be a creepy old man.

We need to hear stories from older women. There's a wealth of wisdom and real resilience there, but they're silenced.

My brain is just so busy. I'm inattentive; I'm a daydreamer: the space cadet kind.

Christmas makes me happy no matter what time of year it comes around.

One time when somebody showed up in a wedding dress, but I never knew if it was a joke, or she was serious. She asked me to marry her. She was serious. It was pretty funny.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

An empty canvas is full.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

Paint the essential character of things.

Back in 1960 at Christmas time, I did work loading and unloading boxcars for Railway Express. That was a kind of weight training that helped me. I weighed about 160 when I started. I began to gain weight and kept right on gaining until I reached 195 pounds.

I've never looked forward to a birthday like I'm looking forward to my new daughter's birthday, because two days after that is when I can apply for reinstatement.

I still gamble, but it's all legal. I own horses, and I go to watch my horse. I don't go daily.

Sparky Anderson taught me this a long time ago: 'There's three ways you can treat a person. You can pat 'em on the butt, you can kick 'em in the butt, or you can leave 'em alone.'

If somebody is gracious enough to give me a second chance, I won't need a third.

I like Barack Obama as a person. He's articulate, he knows sports, his brother-in-law's a coach. He always has the athletes to the White House. But I don't know about some of his policies and some of these people in Congress.

It's a round ball and a round bat, and you got to hit it square.

Willie Mays could throw better, and Hank Aaron could hit more home runs. But I've got enthusiasm. I've got desire. I've got hustle. Those are God-given talents, too.

My father taught me that the only way you can make good at anything is to practice, and then practice some more.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.

I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Either move or be moved.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Fantastic! Right in the middle of that long stretch between Christmas and Spring Break, your coats are getting dirty, everything's dark, dingy - what a great time for a movie!

I don't want to be too cool. You get so caught up with whether you're doing it right.

I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts, 'cause they were cooler; they had better taste in music, for one thing, I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!

Many filmmakers portray teenagers as immoral and ignorant, with pursuits that are pretty base... But I haven't found that to be the case. I listen to kids. I respect them... Some of them are as bright as any of the adults I've met.

I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I'm done is write another one. Then I don't feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away. That's why I tend to work with the same people; I really befriend them.