I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

When I was 8 years old, I saw ‚Raiders of the Lost Ark‘ in Charlotte, North Carolina. I walked out of there and was so inspired. I loved the movie, and I knew I wanted to be that guy.

Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

I modelled my looks on the town tramp.

My dad used to have an expression – ‚It is the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do, and thinks it still matters.‘

That is my wish, hope, instruction for all of you: Take your education seriously, okay? Always do that. Because I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my education.

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

I guess any movie actor can become a role model for audiences out there who enjoy him.

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music – which I did want to be fun, and I did want it to be about individuality, but please also take away from it that there’s no dream that’s too big.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

If a small-town boy like me who bagged groceries was able to make his dreams come true, you can too.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?

Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

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

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‚Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do‘.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

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

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

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

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

Hope is a waking dream.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘