As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

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

You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

I always dreamt of holding the bat and winning games for India. That was my inspiration to take up cricket.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

To not be modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked with have done their best work by far with me.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Everywhere I go I find that people… both leaders and individuals… are asking one basic question, ‚Is there any hope for the future?‘ My answer is the same, ‚Yes, through Jesus Christ.‘

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.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

All that spirits desire, spirits attain.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

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

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

Every artist was first an amateur.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

If we’re going to bring out the best in people, we, too, need to sow seeds of encouragement.

People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.

Prince Charles is definitely my hero; he uses his position to do only good in this world.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?

As an artist, as a brand, as a rapper, as a musician, you know you got a window and a lot of people, even an athlete; they don’t have no exit strategy. It’s just living in the false reality that it’s going to be like this forever.

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

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.

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.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

It is not the body’s posture, but the heart’s attitude that counts when we pray.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.