Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

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.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Strong emotions such as passion and bliss are indications that you’re connected to Spirit, or ‚inspired,‘ if you will. When you’re inspired, you activate dormant forces, and the abundance you seek in any form comes streaming into your life.

It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

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.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

The intensity of the football and how the people live football in Liverpool – it is not a usual.

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

I love performing, you know, because, like I say, I’m a ham for this stuff.

I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families – and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

It doesn’t matter if you want to be a teacher, an astronaut, or a reggaeton singer, you need to study.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Racing, competing, it’s in my blood. It’s part of me, it’s part of my life; I have been doing it all my life and it stands out above everything else.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

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

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

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.

The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is forever in a passion.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

All of my writing is God-given.

Music is really driving my whole life.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

If you’re going to spend two years of your life on something, it has to matter to you; you have to be passionate about it.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.