A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as ‚evil.‘ Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

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.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

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

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

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.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

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

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.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

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.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

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

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

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.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

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

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

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

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

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

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

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

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.