If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

I’m inspired by people who keep on rolling, no matter their age.

If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

I create stars.

Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

I second-guess and overthink and rethink every single thing that I do.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

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

In order to carry a positive action we must develop here a positive vision.

Someone said to me, ‚If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?‘ My answer was then and still is, ‚If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.‘

One reason I don’t want to play in England again is because we don’t have any personalities.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.

I want to represent… to the kids to draw strength from me. So they can see that everybody goes through something, but you can rise up and do your best. Just try.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

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.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It’s not called quitting if you quit while you ahead. It’s about being aware and being strategic enough to know that you got to get out the pool at some point. You got to put your clothes back on and dry off.

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Control your own destiny! Control your own destiny!

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

Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

I’m not very ambitious at all.

That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.

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.

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

If you don’t set the tone for the day, the devil will set it for you.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

Man is not made for defeat.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

If you want to have sustained joy, you have to not only make sure that you think right, but you also have to make decisions now that are going to guarantee some joy in the future.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.