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

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

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

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

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

I began playing Monopoly for real when I was 26 years old. Today, my wife and I have approximately 1,400 little green houses – each paying us monthly. You do not have to be a rocket scientist or have a Harvard degree to play Monopoly for real.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

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.

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.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

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

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

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

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

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

The first step on the way to victory is to recognize the enemy.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

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

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

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

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

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.

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

There is spontaneity to my work.

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?

Never regret what you don’t write.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

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

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.