No great thing is created suddenly.

I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It’s sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‚Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed – there’s so little competition.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

I want to elongate my cricketing career as a consistent player. I have personal goals I would like to achieve someday.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto – I tell people you don’t have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

I gather from motivation around me – from a lot of personalities who have done well in their respective fields.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.

You need to overcome the tug of people against you as you reach for high goals.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

Never regret what you don’t write.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

New roads; new ruts.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

It is extremely difficult to say how long the process actually took to finally achieve my fragrance, Boudoir, because there was a lot of time waiting around for other people.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

Art is the proper task of life.

Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress.

The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.

Sometimes you have to take two steps back to take ten forward.

Aim for the highest.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

We can all be successful and make money, but when we die, that ends. But when you are significant is when you help other people be successful. That lasts many a lifetime.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

We are going to transform Britain’s rail system from the worst in the world to the best. If you can do a few things like that, when the body gives out, you can say you’ve lived a good life.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

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.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

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.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

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.