Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

No great thing is created suddenly.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

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.

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’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

From the boys‘ point of view, scouting puts them into fraternity-gangs, which is their natural organisation, whether for games, mischief, or loafing; it gives them a smart dress and equipments; it appeals to their imagination and romance; and it engages them in an active, open-air life.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

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

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

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.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

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.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

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.

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

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

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.

I made all my generals out of mud.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

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.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.