The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.

God has equipped you to handle difficult things. In fact, He has already planted the seeds of discipline and self-control inside you. You just have to water those seeds with His Word to make them grow!

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

When I heard ‚Jesus, Take the Wheel,‘ I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you’re a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

We’re all dreamers.

My mother is a strong, wonderful woman. I could never be anything she didn’t want me to be.

Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

Bhai was my hero and he had immense influence on me.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‚Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?‘

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

I love those who do not know how to live for today.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

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.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Wine gives a man nothing… it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

In art the best is good enough.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.

Always do whatever’s next.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

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.

I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.

If you can dream it, you can do it.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.