My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you’re allowed to fail.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I don’t profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

‚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 music be the food of love, play on.

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

Motives reveal why we do what we do, which is actually more important to God than what we’re doing.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

I was very camera shy. People like hot girls, so I put my music to hot girls and it just became a trend. The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me.

The Bible says that God has a reason for keeping us here; if He didn’t, He would take us to Heaven far sooner.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

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

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

I make good music for long journeys.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

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

Since day one, since the first time I touched the pen, I wanted to be the best at what I do.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

One day, I’ll be listening to a bunch of Ray Charles, the next day it’s nothing but Red Hot Chili Peppers. The next day it might be Tupac all day.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.