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.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

As a kid, I used to see how Sachin Tendulkar used to win matches under pressure for India in Sharjah or other places. So I was always keen to repeat the same in similar situations. I don’t take pressure on myself when I am in the middle. I love pressure, and I always believe that pressure makes you more focused.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Energy begets energy.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

Integrity means that you are the same in public as you are in private.

The love of heaven makes one heavenly.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Eventually, it came to this place like, ‚I’d like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.‘ ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ became the story to tell.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

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.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

The X is an amazing car, but we kind of got carried away with the art and technology. Obviously, you want great art. You want great technology. But we did get a little distracted from our mission, which was to advance the cause of electric vehicles. And it probably delayed us a little bit with the Model 3 as well.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

A good model of how to ‚work with the enemy‘ internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.

Why lie? I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say the opposite of what I think, like some others do.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

I’m a human being. I’ve got opinions, I’m not always right, I’m not always on time, I don’t always say things in the proper way, but my intentions are always extremely pure.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.