I call architecture frozen music.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

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

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

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.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn’t be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

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.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

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

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

I like being a writer.

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.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

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

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

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

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Their houses are all built in the shape of tents, with very high chimneys.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I hate the idea of genres.