I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.

I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they’ll do wonders. I count on them.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

What a nice night for an evening.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

I find a lot of inspiration through visuals. When I was 12, I saw Aurora’s ‚Runaway‘ music video. Something inside me clicked, like, ‚That is what I want to do, no matter whether it goes anywhere or not.‘

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

I believe the destiny of your generation – and your nation – is a rendezvous with excellence.

God has equipped you to handle difficult things. In fact, He has already planted the seeds of discipline and self-control inside you. You just have to water those seeds with His Word to make them grow!

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

I want to be an Asian Robert De Niro.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

Steven Spielberg was my childhood hero.

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

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.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

Attitude and enthusiasm play a big part in my life. I get excited about the things that inspire me. I also believe in laughing and having a good time.

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.

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

Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.

Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

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

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

Civil disobedience’s main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

It’s like a jar of salad dressing sitting on a shelf… most of the seasoning settles to the bottom of the bottle. But when you shake that bottle up, all the ingredients mix together and then the dressing can add flavor to a salad. In the same way, we can stir ourselves up and regain the reverence, respect and awe we once had for the Lord.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

Snoop ain’t never cosigned me, but I know everybody is like, ‚That’s the next Snoop.‘ Nah, I’m Nipsey, and I got to work to define myself.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Becoming an inspiration for kids is great. I want to inspire them to do whatever they want to.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

If you are a leader, you should never forget that everyone needs encouragement. And everyone who receives it – young or old, successful or less-than-successful, unknown or famous – is changed by it.

Working with J Balvin has undoubtedly been an unparalleled experience.

It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

Love is the answer, and you know that for sure; Love is a flower, you’ve got to let it grow.

Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

Labor gives birth to ideas.