Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

There is spontaneity to my work.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

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.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

You fail only if you stop writing.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

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

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families – and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

There’s no formula.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I feel Anglo-American.

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.

I really love the culture of hip-hop.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

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.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

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

The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it’s popular, it’s not culture.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

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.

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.