All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

Every artist was first an amateur.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

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.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

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

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

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

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.

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.

My kids are coming up in a different time then me. Interracial couples are of the norm. With me, it’s about making sure my kids understand the importance of education and having opportunities that I didn’t. My goal as a parent is to make sure they don’t take what they have for granted.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

I always joke that my kids‘ favorite holiday is Father’s Day. They love the way I celebrate the occasion by writing each of them a thank-you letter and a generous check. It’s my way of letting them know how much I appreciate the great pleasure and privilege of being their dad.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

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

I like being a writer.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

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.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

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

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

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.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.