The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‚I’m possible‘!

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.

We’re all dreamers.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

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 man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

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.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‚I’m with you kid. Let’s go.‘

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir are not superhuman. They are ordinary people with ordinary frailties. But therein lies the power of their example.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Think off-center.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

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

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

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.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

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.

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

‚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.‘

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.