No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

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.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

Imagination rules the world.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

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

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

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

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

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

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.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

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

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

I’m thrilled to have Corona join me on my ‚X100PRE‘ Tour to give my fans a taste of Corona Estereo Beach and showcase their support of Latin music. It’s not solely about the music – it’s about the culture, creativity, and contributing to the movement that connects us all together.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

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.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

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

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

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.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

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

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.