I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

One of the amazing things about ‚Seven Samurai‘ is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you’ve got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

If we’re going to bring out the best in people, we, too, need to sow seeds of encouragement.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

You fail only if you stop writing.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

I love the name of honor, more than I fear death.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.

A lot of the stuff I do in terms of PR, I learned it from Muhammad Ali.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably… drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.

Whatever that means, however you got on that mountain, why not try to climb it? And do it in your own way.

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

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

No man was ever wise by chance.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.