Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

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.

Oh yes, I love to do shoes. I’m not a fetishist but I love to do shoes.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

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.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

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

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

I’m a painter in sound.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

I’ve learned over the years that when I go to that place of passion within me, there’s no force in the universe that can interfere with my completing a project.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

You will never fulfill your destiny doing work you despise.

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.

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.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

I do have a few little tattoos, but they were mostly done to cover scars because I’m so fair.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

My dream is to continue filming until my body tells me to stop.

Whatever you want to do, do with full passion and work really hard towards it. Don’t look anywhere else. There will be a few distractions, but if you can be true to yourself, you will be successful for sure.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.