Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

I’m grateful for the evangelical resurgence we’ve seen across the world in the last half-century or so. It truly has been God’s doing.

There’s no happier person than a truly thankful, content person.

I always like to create things that get attention. It used to be a problem when I wasn’t famous. Now, I can do whatever I want and people have to accept it.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man’s, I mean.

You know, God gave me a gift to do other things besides play the game of basketball.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

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.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

When you focus on how wonderful God is and all the great things He’s done… is doing… and even will do in your life, your natural response will be praise, adoration and awe. Don’t let yourself ever get used to it… stay amazed!

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Look folks, we know who built this country and we know who is going to rebuild it. It’s you. Instead of vilifying you, we should be thanking you. We owe you.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

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

You fail only if you stop writing.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, ‚Oh God, I’ve got to do this today.‘

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Be content with what you are, and wish not change; nor dread your last day, nor long for it.

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I have a very good family. I’m very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It’s one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

I know that when I pray, something wonderful happens. Not just to the person or persons for whom I’m praying, but also something wonderful happens to me. I’m grateful that I’m heard.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

I know that I came into the world with what I call ‚big dharma‘ – with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.

Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.

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.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.