Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

I don’t know how the rap game is, because I’m a fan of reality, and the rap game’s entertainment.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

For me, the essence of the great American Dream is spiritual. I believe that our Constitution is inspired and that it is based on principles that are timeless and universal. This is the reason why 95% of all written constitutions throughout the world are modeled after our Constitution.

God’s Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

If you can talk, you can write.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

Every artist was first an amateur.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They’re my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He’s just really cool.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

In art the best is good enough.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‚I’m possible‘!

Every day, the people I meet inspire me… every day, they make me proud… every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

Genius, when young, is divine.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

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

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

Energy, like the biblical grain of the mustard-seed, will remove mountains.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

We are not cisterns made for hoarding, we are channels made for sharing.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs – that’s where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that’s very cool.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.