Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

President Assad, I worked with. I know him reasonably well, met with him a few times, and he’s a liar.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

Stand-up comedy is mine: it’s my entity; it’s my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.

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

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

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

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

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.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

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

I wanted to write.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

When you’re faced with an opponent, the media asks the questions, and I answer truthfully. I don’t hold back.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

I do have tatoos, and I do wear leather, but there are other sides of me, that my film express.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

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.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

I’m a free spirit.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

I wanted to get a job being creative, and I did.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

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.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

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

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

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.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

Dissents speak to a future age.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.