I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

I’ve always done whatever I want and always been exactly who I am.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

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

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

Language is the dress of thought.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

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.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

My imagination is a twisted place.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

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.

I’ve had everything pierced at some point.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

All of my writing is God-given.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

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?

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.