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

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

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

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

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.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. It’s a pretty good test.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

I have surrounded myself with very smart people.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

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.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

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.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

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

For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Think off-center.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

If two smart, intelligent, clever guys sit together on a table, and you both want the same, where can be the problem? We all want to be successful.

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 you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

I wrote a song with Ed Sheeran that was kind of spontaneous.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.