Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

The best road to progress is freedom’s road.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

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

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

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

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

America is the greatest country in the world.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

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

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

All of my music is honest.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

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.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein’s regime is a better and safer place.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.