Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

I think you can give a pure artistic product if you understand how to build your own industry.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

I hope that people around the world will be as inspired as I am to step up and to speak out on behalf of girls around the world who struggle to go to school.

If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

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

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

A word after a word after a word is power.

The factory is the machine that builds the machine.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

Music is really driving my whole life.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band – or at least in a Pixies cover band.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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.

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

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

I’ve never been to New Zealand before. But one of my role models, Xena, the warrior princess, comes from there.

My inspiration is R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, and Prince – for the vocals, anyway.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

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

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Hope is a waking dream.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

Faith Hill is a big role model.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Children always turn to the light.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

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

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.