It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

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.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

The successful men I admired all built their bodies.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

Cast away your sloth, your lethargy, your coldness, or whatever interferes with your chaste and pure love for Christ, your soul’s husband. Make Him the source, the center, and the circumference of all your soul’s range of delight.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Imagination decides everything.

You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

Every artist was first an amateur.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,‘ he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. ‚Shake it off. Stop complainin‘. Stop grumblin‘. Stop cryin‘. We are going to press on. We have work to do.

When I checked into SEAL Team One many years ago, one of the things that I noticed was there was this old guy, who was younger than I am today, who I decided that I was going to be like. I wanted to emulate what he was doing, and one of those things was he got to work before anybody else.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

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

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

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

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

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

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir are not superhuman. They are ordinary people with ordinary frailties. But therein lies the power of their example.

Anyone can be a Superman, but nobody can be Jackie Chan.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

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 have fun with ideas; I play with them.

The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.