We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

The potential financial reward for building the ‚next Windows‘ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

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

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

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

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

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

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

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

I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.

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

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

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 of my writing is God-given.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

If that’s there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

We must ensure that technology is accessible, affordable, and adds value.