The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

I always felt like there was a certain standard of music that I had to do from the beginning, even when I didn’t have the recognition that I have now.

I don’t like to feel like I’m in a club when I’m in my car and I turn on the radio. Anything that ceases to be a song and just sounds like house music kind of stresses me out.

I sang a lot of low stuff on songs like ‚Secrets‘ and ‚Rockin‘,‘ almost like Toni Braxton. On ‚Secrets,‘ I’m a different person.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it pisses me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say ‚What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!‘

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

You go to a festival, you know you’re not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I’ve made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

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

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

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

I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn’t have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that – except I couldn’t afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.

My nails are my rhythm section when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

It’s always fun to talk about jazz.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

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

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

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.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.

Bob Dylan is like an alien on this earth, and I love him! I cried when I saw him play live because I was so close to him.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

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.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

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

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.