My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

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.

I’m really bad with answering questions. Usually, I don’t even answer them. I try to find inspiration inside of the question. I think, and I jump from one beam of inspiration or energy to the next, as opposed to explaining the energy.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

People want to feel hopeful.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

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.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

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.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed… Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

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

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

I do have motivation. A lot of motivation.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.

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

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

No great thing is created suddenly.

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‚Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do‘.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

I’ve been blessed to be somebody that’s been climbing that success mountain top for years of hard work, you know, but now it’s all connecting. And now, the whole world is watching, you know what I’m saying, and it feels good ‚cause it’s good energy. This is all positive vibes, and good vibes and good energy, so it feels incredible.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

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

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I’m telling you there is hope. I have seen it, but it does not come from the governments or corporations. It comes from the people.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I’ve never been to New Zealand before. But one of my role models, Xena, the warrior princess, comes from there.