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.

Becoming an inspiration for kids is great. I want to inspire them to do whatever they want to.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

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.

I’m not saying that people should stop flying. I’m just saying it needs to be easier to be climate neutral.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of ‚Hitchhiker’s,‘ and I thought, ‚No, no.‘ I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

If you don’t have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

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?

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

I like to work with artists from around the world. There are so many new inspiring filmmakers.

I’m frugal. I’m not a very acquisitive woman. I never waste food. If you prepare your own food, you engage with the world, it tastes alive. It tastes good.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known – the plantations – because they attempted to exercise their ‚democratic‘ right to vote.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

Wall Street apparently takes and then forgets, and then comes after the guns of law-abiding American citizens and small businesses.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

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.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed… Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

When people are around us, they should leave better off than they were previously. Rather than feeling discouraged or defeated, people should feel challenged and inspired after spending any time with you and me.

The greatest story of all is Colonel Sanders. He didn’t start until he was sixty-six on a freeway bypass for his chicken shop. Anything is possible!

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.

Bhai was my hero and he had immense influence on me.