It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Who would’ve thought doing nothing all the time would turn out to be so damn tiring?

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

One can say that he consumed one whole week waiting for the return of that single hour every seven days — and waiting means racing ahead, means seeing time and the present not as a gift, but as a barrier, denying and negating their value, vaulting over them in your mind. Waiting, people say, is boring. But in actuality, it can just as easily be diverting, because it devours quantities of time without our ever experiencing or using them for their own sake.

Getting up at odd hours to catch flights. I hate the long hours of waiting. There are times when one is continuously travelling, from one city to another, hopping from one studio to another or changing from one costume to another. It is annoying, but after a point, one learns to be immune to one’s surroundings.

One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.

I’ve never taken much time to do nothing, which I think is pretty important, especially at my age, and sort of contemplating what is coming. In this culture, we spend most of our time trying to avoid it. I would like to have more of a Buddhist approach.

From what I awaited, came my habit of waiting.

I’m in a real period of not-doing. The usual aggressive, ambitious, driven heartbeat, rapping at the door has subsided for a while.

Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing.

When I work, I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Every time I know we have to go out on tour, there’s about three or four weeks where I’m terrified—where I start thinking: That’s not me. I’m not Freddie Mercury. Then I go out onstage and it’s like diving into the cold Puget Sound after spending five weeks in Hawaii—there’s a shock to the system, but the fear goes away. You get used to it, which is pretty cool, because if I stopped performing, I could just disappear and end up being some weird chattering man that walks the streets in rags, staring only at the pavement. At first you rationalize that going to a club where people recognize you is a bad idea; then going to a neighborhood bar becomes a bad idea, too. Going to the grocery store becomes a bad idea. Answering the phone becomes a bad idea. Then every time the dog barks, you think the National Guard is on your roof ready to drill holes in the shingles and shoot at you. So I have to deal with the outside world on sort of a maintenance level—go out to a bar every so often and just be around people.