I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.

The men I idolized built their bodies and became somebody – like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger – and I thought, ‚That can be me.‘ So I started working out. The funny thing is I didn’t realize back then that I was having a defining moment.

No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results.

My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

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 love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

I’ve never been to New Zealand before. But one of my role models, Xena, the warrior princess, comes from there.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

Most of my songs have names of people I’ve met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

The truest wisdom is a resolute determination.

Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

Outsourcing is inevitable, and I don’t think it’s necessarily treating people like things.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

I believe growth should be constant, sustained and inclusive. It’s only meaningful if these three things are there. Otherwise they’re just economic figures.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.