I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

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.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

I cook, I create, I’m incredibly excited by what I do, I’ve still got a lot to achieve.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

The way to know life is to love many things.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

Genius, when young, is divine.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

My mother is a singer, my sisters all sing, my uncles are incredible singers and guitar players, so it’s just kind of been like my habitat.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I’m such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

Art is the proper task of life.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

Although I’ve been living in the British Virgin Islands for some time now, I have never stopped caring passionately about the U.K. and its great people.

I listen to music all day every day. I can’t not listen to music. It’s kind of scary how much I listen to music, but it’s what I love, and it’s all I care about, so I’m good with it.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

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

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

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

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

I usually write lyrics first, and then when I get home or close to any kind of instrument, I usually make a melody for those lyrics.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

If you play an instrument, it makes you a better singer. The more you play, the better you sing, the more you sing, the better you play.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.