A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

My drive is other people’s success.

When you’re around me and really see that all I do is live and breathe for my work, it’s not strange, it’s just Gaga.

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.

Let us be shy no longer. Let us go to our strength. Let us offer hope. Let us tell the world that a new age is not only possible but probable.

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

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.

Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith.

You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.

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

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

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. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I’m just a kid that defied the odds. I’m just a kid that ignored the doubt. I’m just a kid from a little place in Dublin, Ireland, that went all the way, and I’m going to continue to go all the way.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait. The grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

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.

To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in this treasure house, the Bible?

O, had I but followed the arts!

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us thru that darkness to a safe and sane future.

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

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

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.

When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

In every walk of life, you must have leaders. An education in the spiritual world, in the labor field, in the agricultural field, we must have leaders.

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

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