Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

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.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

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

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

When I am putting looks together, I dare myself to make something work. I always look for the most interesting silhouette or something that’s a little off, but I have to figure it out. I have to make it me. I think that’s the thrill in fashion.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

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.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

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.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

I think you can give a pure artistic product if you understand how to build your own industry.

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

There’s no formula.

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

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.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

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

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

I call architecture frozen music.

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.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.