Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

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

All art is but imitation of nature.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

I’m inspired by people who keep on rolling, no matter their age.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

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

Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

The truth is, anyone can start projects. The world is full of just-started projects that looked great at the time but were never completed.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.

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!

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

You can’t hire someone to practice for you.

I always make my dreams into goals.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

I pity the fool who just gives up.

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

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they’re making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that’s the difference.

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

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

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.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Never complain and never explain.

In any profession it gets to be a grind.

I have the space and liberty to create.

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it 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.

I don’t know if I could do this with the same energy, and in the same way – all the costume changes and glitter and hair and makeup – all the time. When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

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

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Life doesn’t require that we be the best, only that we try our best.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Competition is a sin.