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

You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

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

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.

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.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

But I was amazed at how organized the Palestinian election authority was, how competent they were in setting up their polling places and the poll workers they had.

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.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

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.

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.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

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

I admire people who destroy themselves.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

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.

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.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

All of my writing is God-given.

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.

To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

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

We will naturally pursue our goals on the strength of our own resources, skills and enterprise. But, we know that we will be more successful when we do this in partnership with the world.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably… drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

Genius, when young, is divine.

Our love, our gratitude, our admiration for our men and women in uniform, our veterans and their families – all of that is bigger than any one party or any one election.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.