Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Think off-center.

I’m an inventor.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

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

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.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

Quite frankly, Russian aggression in Ukraine and its illegal occupation of Crimea remind us that we still have a good deal more work to do to guarantee the strategic vision of a Europe whole, free and at peace.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

I hate the idea of genres.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

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

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.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

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.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

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

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

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.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

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.

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

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

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.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

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

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

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

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

I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it’s still being invented; we’re still trying to work out how it works. There’s a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn’t recognise. It’s time for the machines to disappear. The computer’s got to disappear into all of the things we use.

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

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‚I know.‘ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

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.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.