Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

A Jewish woman had two chickens. One got sick, so the woman made chicken soup out of the other one to help the sick one get well.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

Image, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work – that’s Prince to me.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

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

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

I like being a writer.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.