The last people with any ideas are young people.

I like to be creative.

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

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

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.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

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

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I love the 3D revolution. I love the technology today that continues to push the envelope, continues break the new ground, and continues to raise the bar.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

Fashion has become so whatever. I don’t think there are any stones left to unturn.

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

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

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 don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

We know that the nation that goes all-in on innovation today will own the global economy tomorrow. This is an edge America cannot surrender.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

I have the space and liberty to create.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

We will explore the mysteries of science and harness the power of technology and innovation. We will realise the opportunities of the digital world. Our youth will learn more from – and with – each other.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.