I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

‚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.‘

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

Becoming an inspiration for kids is great. I want to inspire them to do whatever they want to.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

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?

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

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.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

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

The kids never listen to you, especially the youngest ones.

You fail only if you stop writing.

I was called ‚Dumbo,‘ like the elephant, as a child because I couldn’t understand things at school.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

I was ironing my own clothes when I was 11 years old. My mental strength goes back to those days.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

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

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

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

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

I used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

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

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

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

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

I wasn’t a kid growing up thinking, ‚One day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech.‘ That wasn’t on my mind.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

Brad will tell you. He puts a movie on, I’m asleep in 10 minutes. I have no patience. But the kids love action movies with comedy, Jackie Chan and all that.

I never dreamed of being a pop star when I was a child.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.