Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

The expression a woman wears on her face is far more important than the clothes she wears on her back.

I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

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.

Hair is about when you’re younger. I am my hair.

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I’m just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way yall need Jesus.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader – or any person – in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

I don’t like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.

I had a great time being a salesman because of the pitches that I gave when I was selling shoes. However, I don’t think I’m as well versed in shoes as I am in comedy. Being a salesman was all about being a people person, and I enjoy being around people. I also love talking to people – which is why I think I did so well.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

When you have good friends you’ve been around, every time they talk, you don’t give them your full attention. You don’t look them in the eye and stop. Half the time, you’re listening, half the time, you are ignoring them.

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.

If you’re too big to fit into fashion, then you just have to do your own fashion.

It’s important to love in hip hop.

Music is something no one can control.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

I’ll never make it, it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ‚cause they’re screaming all the time.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

Who’s to say what’s a good voice and not a good voice?

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

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.

I’m blessed to have such a tight-knit family that we can talk about anything. Whether we talk frequently or not, since we’re on separate ends of the country, there are a lot of moving parts, and we always stay tight and find that center ground that keeps us together.

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

‚Nothin‘ on You‘ by B.o.B was the first song where I heard myself on the radio. I’d been trying my whole career to write a song like that, which incorporates live instruments with hip-hop and singing.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

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.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

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.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

To all the musicians, to the Academy, with all due respect, reggaeton is part of our Latin culture. And its representing as much as any other genre at the worldwide level.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.