In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

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.

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.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

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.

I’m trying to get to Mars before everyone else.

I never played with anything like toys.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Young people can create beautiful things.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

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.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

I made all my generals out of mud.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

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 don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

All good art is an indiscretion.

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

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

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.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

My imagination is a twisted place.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.