I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

Think off-center.

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.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

There is a lot of pressure put on me, but I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself. I feel if I play my game, it will take care of itself.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

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

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

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. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

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

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Dancers are always striving for perfection. A great dancer never achieves it: you always want to do another turn, a higher jump,a more difficult acrobatic jump.

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

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet; I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She’s sort of become my fairy godmother.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

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

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

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.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I was asked to act when I couldn’t act. I was asked to sing ‚Funny Face‘ when I couldn’t sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn’t dance – and do all kinds of things I wasn’t prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

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?

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

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

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.