A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

I made all my generals out of mud.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

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

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

In art the best is good enough.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Whenever you do something, people try to re-do it and do a better version, especially if they’re in another country.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

To solve any problem, here are three questions to ask yourself: First, what could I do? Second, what could I read? And third, who could I ask?

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Everyone I look up to is bringing me into the tech world. You’d be surprised by all the music people in it, invested in it.

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

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

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

Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

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?

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

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

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

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

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.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.