People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.

Imagination decides everything.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Taking bold action on climate change simply makes good business sense. It’s also the right thing to do for people and the planet. Setting a net-zero GHG emissions target by 2050 will drive innovation, grow jobs, build prosperity, and secure a better world for what will soon be 9 billion people.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

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

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 never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

With recording, everything changed. 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. It’s an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.

Science is magic that works.

There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

The signing of the Sex Pistols was a turning point for Virgin. It put the company on the map and, over the years, attracted bands such as Genesis, the Rolling Stones, Lenny Kravitz, and Janet Jackson. It also attracted Culture Club, who were ground-breaking.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

Entrepreneurs are natural problem-solvers, which means that we always have ideas for new businesses popping into our heads. Having a lot of options is great, but sometimes it can be hard to focus on one when you are keen to move onto the next.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

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.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

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

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

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

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

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

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.