Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

What is past is prologue.

Action expresses priorities.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

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

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

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

When asked, ‚How do you write?‘ I invariably answer, ‚one word at a time.‘

Do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.

My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out in ward and stake councils.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

Since I was old enough to understand what a songwriter/producer is, I’ve had a curiosity about how Max Martin creates what he creates. I wanted to see that happen. I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn from him.

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 book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

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.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

I have the space and liberty to create.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

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

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.