The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably… drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

There’s no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there’s such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

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.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

I think I’ve committed the one really bad English crime, which is I’ve risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I’m claiming that I’m an artist of some kind.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

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

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

With drive and a bit of talent, you can move mountains. I know. I’ve done it.

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

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

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.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

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

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

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

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

I love being in a courtroom.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

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.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.