I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

I’m totally myself.

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

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.

Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.

America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

I’m a free spirit.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.

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.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

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

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Put a love note in his shaving kit before he leaves on a business trip.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

It is not so much our friends‘ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

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.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

I have a really close relationship with Mike Bloomberg.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

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

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

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

Any man who doesn’t love his mama can’t be no friend of mine.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

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

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

Key is never be afraid of being yourself. Never!

Necessity… the mother of invention.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely.

Every relationship should eventually become a long-term relationship. Any director that I meet now isn’t just a director. He’s potentially a friend, and someone I can call to do a project that I want or that I have.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.