As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

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.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

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.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

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 write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

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

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

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.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

There’s no formula.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

The artist in me cries out for design.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

Few people have the imagination for reality.

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

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.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Creative people don’t behave very well generally. If you’re looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you’re gonna be depressed real fast. I don’t have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She’s my first priority.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

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

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.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.