All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band – or at least in a Pixies cover band.

I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

I wear wigs all the time on shows, and every day when I’m in public, at Dollywood. People say, ‚How many wigs do you have?‘ And I say, ‚Well, at least 365 because I wear at least one a day.‘

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

Music is in my DNA!

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn’t want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

If music be the food of love, play on.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

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

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

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.

Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

California has a special relationship with the Internet. Many of the core technologies that power the Internet were invented here. Many of the most successful online entrepreneurs and content creators – in business, the arts, and countless other endeavors – got their start here.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

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.

What I’m hoping is that every album I’m going to do will give my audience something different, and that they’ll grow as I do.