Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

The first thing I do when I get up, I have breakfast.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I really like hip-hop and rap; that’s my main influence. I really wanna be more of a hip-hop artist.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

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

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

The influence of ‚Hidden Fortress‘ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

I have the Midas touch, in the way that when I hook up with a project, I feel, not speaking cocky or conceited, but there’s a confidence I have. I learned that from Muhammad Ali; I used to bodyguard him. He taught me about confidence. So when it comes to any job I work, I’m gonna do it good; I’m going to bring it over the top.

To be in any way a positive contribution, that’s all anybody wants to be. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. I wanted to be an artist, be a mother. You want to feel that in your life you’ve been of use, in whatever way that comes out.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

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

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

My mom cleaned toilets for a long time, and she’d seen a lot of terrible things, but she was still the strength of our family. And there are women like that all across the country – all around the world – who show that type of fortitude.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

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

The skin of my character in ‚The Man Who Fell to Earth‘ was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

After the first day of practice, there’s not one guy who’s playing at 100 percent or who feels great. Sometimes, getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is the hardest part of the day – it just hurts.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

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.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.