I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.

Music is like film to me.

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

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

I’ve always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

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

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

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.

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.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

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

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Science is global. Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity, we should not distort it. Science does not differentiate between multiple races.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

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

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

Imagination rules the world.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

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’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

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