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

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

We have soon to have everywhere smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonizers, sterilizers of water, air, food and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads and in subways. It will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will got to town to rest and get well.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

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

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

We have to build the capacity of our institutions, employees and workers. Our regulatory environment has not been encouraging to research, innovation and enterprise.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

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

It’s a juicy thing to say we’re building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

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

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

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.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

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.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

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

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

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.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.

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

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

Entrepreneurs are natural problem-solvers, which means that we always have ideas for new businesses popping into our heads. Having a lot of options is great, but sometimes it can be hard to focus on one when you are keen to move onto the next.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

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.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.