I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

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.

I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

I like Cardi B!

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

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.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Aside from singing, I’m also a dancer. I’ve been dancing since I was 8.

It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

I love being in a courtroom.

It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry.

I’m the king of the anthems.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

If I am a cup maker, I’m interested in making the best cup I possibly can. My effort goes into that cup, not what people think about it.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

I still love football, though, and I think cooking is like football. It’s not a job, it’s a passion. When you become good at it, it’s a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

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

It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn’t mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

Genius, when young, is divine.