The artist in me cries out for design.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

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

To hold a pen is to be at war.

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

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Imagination decides everything.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

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

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

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

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

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‚Nice doggie‘ until you can find a rock.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

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.

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?

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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

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 never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

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.

I’m the king of the anthems.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

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.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

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.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of ‚Hitchhiker’s,‘ and I thought, ‚No, no.‘ I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

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 you come to see a picture of mine, I want you to know that I’m not going to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. I want you to know that you won’t be disappointed in me.

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

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.

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

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.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

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.