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I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

I started out as an artist, and what I do is verbal paintings. I paint a picture. Hopefully, you'll see the characters and what they're doing and what they're saying.

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

I'm a creative guy, artistically with graphics.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

I understand why people went nuts for 'The Artist.' We use words so much, it's nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone - or something - is thinking or feeling.