And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

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.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Strangely, some songs you really don’t want to write.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Sometimes, I’m very embarrassed.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

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.

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.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

I wanted to get a job being creative, and I did.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

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

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

All of my music is honest.

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

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

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.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

When you think about it, three of our biggest financial decisions in life are made at times of peak emotional excitement: deciding to get married, buying a home, and having kids.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

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

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

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.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‚Lights Please‘ happens like that.