I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

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.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

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

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.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

I’m not a photographer, so I didn’t get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That’s the world that I’m moving in, in terms of acting and giving a performance.

I call architecture frozen music.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

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.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

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

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

I believe in being an innovator.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.