Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

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.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

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.

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

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Music is like film to me.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

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

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

It’s amazing, the culture Coach Belichick has been able to create in our system.

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.

The X is an amazing car, but we kind of got carried away with the art and technology. Obviously, you want great art. You want great technology. But we did get a little distracted from our mission, which was to advance the cause of electric vehicles. And it probably delayed us a little bit with the Model 3 as well.

Nothing can affect my voice, it’s so bad.

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

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s!

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

I think you can give a pure artistic product if you understand how to build your own industry.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

I definitely think, generally, rap is misogynistic.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

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

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

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

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

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.