I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

Who’s to say what’s a good voice and not a good voice?

Necessity… the mother of invention.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

All art is quite useless.

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

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

If you’ve got a talent, protect it.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

There is spontaneity to my work.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

Time is money.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Computers make me totally blank out.

Begin with the end in mind.

Genius, when young, is divine.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

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

I’m trying to do what Eddie Murphy did for his generation. You have to show people, ‚I’m different. I’m not just a comedian.‘ I’m trying to become a rock star.

My name is Adam Sandler. I’m not particularly talented. I’m not particularly good-looking. And yet I’m a multi-millionaire.

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I hate the idea of genres.

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

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

I always have to be writing.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

There’s no formula.

I have to be on such a strict diet constantly.

The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

I have no problem yelling at anybody’s kid – free of charge!

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

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

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.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.