The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Imagination decides everything.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

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

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

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

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

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

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.

Art is the proper task of life.

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

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

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

It’s an honor for me to represent urban music, reggaeton, trap and hip-hop.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn’t refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

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.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

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

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

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

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

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

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

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

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.