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

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

I’d like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don’t have misconceptions – they understand. I believe that.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

Preparation for a mission is important. A mission is a voluntary act of service to God and humankind. Missionaries support that privilege with their personal savings. Parents, families, friends, and donors to the General Missionary Fund may also assist.

You learn that there’s no right way to do it, no wrong way to do it. It’s just what you feel comfortable with, to trust that, and don’t let anybody box you in to a certain style of parenting or make you feel a certain way about what your kids do.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

The mainstream is always under attack.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‚suspects.‘

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, ‚What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?‘ And, ‚How does creativity apply across the board?‘

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

In a relationship each person should support the other; they should lift each other up.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

All of my music is honest.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

Part of your heritage in this society is the opportunity to become financially independent.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

If you are not being bullied all I would say – cause I like to talk about the other side of it as well – is you know, be someone that nurtures, and if there’s someone in your class that maybe doesn’t have a lot of friends, be the person that sits with them in the cafeteria sometimes; be the bigger person.

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

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

I have visited Japan several times and have always been shown wonderful hospitality.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

The finest clothing made is a person’s own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

When I’m really interested in something, I get superfocused on that. And I can spend hours upon hours not getting tired of reading about it and still be interested to learn more about it.

No one can say, ‚I have dropped out – I am no longer in the system.‘ When you’re in prison, you’re even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don’t transform the system as an absolute thing.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.