The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Originality is really important.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Rioting is a childish way of trying to be a man, but it takes time to rise out of the hell of hatred and frustration and accept that to be a man you don’t have to riot.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa’s major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

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.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don’t know the probability that a planet develops life.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

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

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.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

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.

As long as your intentions are solid and about growth and progression and being productive and not being idle, then you’re doing good in my book.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents‘ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Our diplomacy and development budget is not just about reducing spending and finding efficiencies. We need a frank conversation about what we stand for as that ‚shining city on a hill.‘ And that conversation begins by acknowledging that we can’t do it on the cheap.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

The Scoutmaster who is a hero to his boys holds a powerful lever to their development but at the same time brings a great responsibility on himself. They are quick enough to see the smallest characteristic about him, whether it be a virtue or a vice.

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