We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.

There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.