Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

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

You cannot be creative with people around you.

I have the space and liberty to create.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Older people sit down and ask, ‚What is it?‘ but the boy asks, ‚What can I do with it?‘.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

My imagination is a twisted place.

In art the best is good enough.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

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.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear – and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

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.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

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.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that’s something we’re proud of.

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

The wise use of your freedom to make your own decisions is crucial to your spiritual growth, now and for eternity.

I believe in being an innovator.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

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

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

No. I mean those people really did something for designers I don’t think department stores can, could or should do still today. Today the world is different so you have to make it differently. There’s TV. There’s a lot of things.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.