I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we’re going to take a step back and think about what’s most likely to achieve that goal.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

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

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

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.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

My imagination is a twisted place.

You fail only if you stop writing.

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

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.

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

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

If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Take advantage of the years of pioneering efforts. You might find this boring, as the young want to rush head on, as it were.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

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

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

If that’s there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

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

My style influences my music and everything around me.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

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

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

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?

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

We must use time creatively.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.

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.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.

You can’t really imagine music without technology.