To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet; I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She’s sort of become my fairy godmother.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

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 task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

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.

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

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

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

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

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

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.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

As everything becomes digitized, there’s the idea that things that can’t be digitized become more valuable.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

With Virgin, I’ve just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

I make such big efforts to forget things and I can’t tell the story of my life because, thank God, I’m still living it.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

No press, no television. If my mom calls and says, ‚Did you hear about?‘ I don’t want to know nothing about anything that is going on in relation to music. I shut it all off.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

A word after a word after a word is power.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

I wake up every day inspiring myself, because God gave me life.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

My superhero has always been Tendulkar, and it will be Tendulkar for life. He is someone who has inspired me immensely. Just watching him play for India, I used to dream of winning games for India, because he used to do it single handedly.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

Life loves the liver of it.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

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.