I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

What keeps me going is goals.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

The truth is, somebody is always talking about you, so you have to let it go… if it’s not a part of your God-given destiny.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘

What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

I’ll never, ever be full. I’ll always be hungry. Obviously, I’m not talking about food. Growing up, I had nothing for such a long time. Someone told me a long time ago, and I’ve never forgotten it, ‚Once you’ve ever been hungry, really, really hungry, then you’ll never, ever be full.‘

Make bold choices and make mistakes. It’s all those things that add up to the person you become.

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say ‚recognize‘ because you’re not… it’s not new.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

A game is like a mirror that allows you to look at yourself.

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

It’s more interesting for me to figure out how to be superior in areas where I’m naive, where I’m a novice.

Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you’ve ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It’s a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.

Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

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.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

Talent without working hard is nothing.

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

I think that when you’re making your way up in the music industry, you have all these heroes and the reasons why they are your heroes. As soon as you get into the industry, your guidelines change a little bit. For me, my heroes now are great people first and great artists second.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Yeah, I like to keep myself interested – I’ll kind of throw myself into some area that I don’t completely know or understand, that I’m not adept at, so I’m forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There’s a good feeling that comes from that.

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Prejudice is a chain, it can hold you. If you prejudice, you can’t move, you keep prejudice for years. Never get nowhere with that.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

I still learn, but I think it’s the best thing in life to have a kid.

You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

Winning, to me, is easy. Winning more is the challenge.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

I think a certain amount of stress in life is good. The stress of just working, which takes effort – I think it keeps you going.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.

Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

You can’t do something forever.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.