It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

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.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

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.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

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

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

I really hope someday in Hollywood, some producer or director will hire me only to do drama.

When you’re supposed to be close and friends in the film, the moment you’re talking as friends off the set, it makes it that much better when you’re filming.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

My imagination is a twisted place.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

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.

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.

Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.