If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance.

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

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

You know, there is always times where you feel discouraged and things coming against you, but I don’t know if I ever wanted to throw in the towel.

In any profession it gets to be a grind.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

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.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

Good intentions never change anything. They only become a deeper and deeper rut.

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!

You can’t think; you just gotta do things.

I think it’s OK to be confident in yourself.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

The only way you gain mental toughness is to do things you’re not happy doing. If you continue doing things that you’re satisfied and make you happy, you’re not getting stronger. You’re staying where you’re at. Either you’re getting better, or you’re getting worse. You’re not staying the same.

The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

Don’t think in the morning. That’s a big mistake that people make. They wake up in the morning and they start thinking. Don’t think. Just execute the plan. The plan is the alarm clock goes off, you get up, you go work out. Get some.

Back in the day, what motivated me was overcoming myself. Now I believe in being a leader. I’ve done it all – I’m good. Now, it’s about setting an example for others to follow. I can’t just talk it – I have to live it.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

It is natural to want to have a future.

Before you start a goal – let’s take care of our insecurities because they are going to surface when you put yourself in the crucible and you’re suffering.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

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.

We may stumble and fall but shall rise again; it should be enough if we did not run away from the battle.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

If you’re in this business and you are scared, then you better do something else.

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.

There’s no formula.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

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.