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

I am the freest author in the world.

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

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

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

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

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

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

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

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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 have the space and liberty to create.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

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

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

Originality is really important.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.