Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

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.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn’t want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

Think off-center.

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

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

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

I wanted to write.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

It’s very fun to be the hunter of the sounds. The hunter of the right energy. And it’s not really about if every sound is correct; it’s more the energy – if it hits you in some way, it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s not perfect. I’m still very excited while hunting for songs.

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

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

There’s no formula.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

A ‚scream‘ is always just that – a noise and not music.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

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

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

When I won the first Grammy, there was no other feeling like that feeling. It just made me feel like I came so far, like that was just a dream a few years before that, and then it was happening right then.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

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

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

Rock ‚n‘ roll is ridiculous. It’s absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we’re wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

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 never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.