Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.

What someone else does or doesn’t do has no effect on me and what I do.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

I’m a genetic optimist.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

When I got depressed, I watched Bruce Lee movies. I learned everything from Bruce Lee.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

I think that success is having fun.

It’s not ‚can‘; it’s ‚will.‘ You have to will things into fruition.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

I’m not a regrets-type person.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed… Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

The men I idolized built their bodies and became somebody – like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger – and I thought, ‚That can be me.‘ So I started working out. The funny thing is I didn’t realize back then that I was having a defining moment.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act.

If I’ve got something do. I’m going to attack it. I’m going to attack that stress.

I always say I wanna work with Alicia Keys. I’m in awe of her.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Being self-made means never making an excuse as to why you can’t take steps toward whatever your goal is.

The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.

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

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

I say that in the most humble way: I always knew that I could perform with the best of ‚em and I could deliver with the best of ‚em.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Confidence is always a good thing to have going into the weekend. Especially where it’s quite difficult to put the lap together.