I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

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.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

From infancy, I have relied on the fiercely sweet spirits of black men; and this is abundantly clear in my work.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

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

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

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

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

There are no record companies in Waikiki.

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.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

I believe in being an innovator.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

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

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

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

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

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

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.