I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families – and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

I filed the MSRB Reform Act, along with Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Doug Jones, because the board that oversees the muni-bond market is too secretive and too incestuous. Its membership shares the same DNA. That means the rulebook for municipal bonds is in the hands of a board that resembles a revolving door of longtime industry confederates.

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

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

I’m substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They’re sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they’re hitting back and forth.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

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

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

The ‚Billionaire‘ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

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

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

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

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

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.

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

If you wish to be a writer, write.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

My dream is to be World Lightweight Champion in the UFC. Have more money than I know what to do with. And have a great life for my kids, grandkids, and everyone in my family.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

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

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Imagination rules the world.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Young people can create beautiful things.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

Remember a few years ago when Congress declared that the sauce on a slice of pizza should count as a vegetable in school lunches? You don’t have to be a nutritionist to know that this doesn’t make much sense.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

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.

Homework’s hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, ‚Okay.‘ And then I sit down and they say, ‚It’s math.‘ ‚No! Not math! English, history, anything!‘

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

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

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.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.