If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

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‘.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

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’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

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

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.

Oh, the difference between nearly right and exactly right.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

Passions are the gales of life.

If a man does his best, what else is there?

I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the best of the past.

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

I tell everybody, I get so much because I give so much. I give freely, I give all my time, give all my money, give all of my soul. I try to motivate people. I try to inspire them.

I never wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. I just wanted to be the first Jackie Chan.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

The Bible says to ‚fear not,‘ but this doesn’t mean you should never feel scared. It means when you do feel fear, keep going forward and do what you are supposed to do. Or as I like to say, do it afraid.

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.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

The only way round is through.

I wake up every day inspiring myself, because God gave me life.

I was impressed with what someone like Karl Lagerfeld built and did and the house that he made, but there was never really a female figure I wanted to emulate.

I always dreamt of holding the bat and winning games for India. That was my inspiration to take up cricket.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Energy begets energy.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

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

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

I have a message to give to the world, and I shall not be thwarted.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

I use my celebrity status to inspire someone, to give them hope.

A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.

Highly functioning self-actualized people simply never imagine what it is that they don’t wish to have as their reality.

My production and songwriting and the environment around those vocals are not inspired by R&B at all.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

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.

Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

For me to talk with Obama and the conversation I had with him, I was letting him know that me and my fans have a special connection, and it’s love, and I believe that love is the answer.

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.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

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.

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

The greatest story of all is Colonel Sanders. He didn’t start until he was sixty-six on a freeway bypass for his chicken shop. Anything is possible!

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.