When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

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.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

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

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn’t collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.

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.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

I’m dying to be a great dad one day, whenever that day comes.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

As soon as I go out into the world, I belong, in a way, to everyone else. It’s legal to follow me. It’s legal to stalk me at the beach. And I can’t call the police or ask them to leave.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

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

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Imagination rules the world.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

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.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone.

The joy and love that I get from playing football are unbelievable. It is such a feeling that I want to give everything that I have got. I just enjoy it, I am living a life that I never even dreamt of.

There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

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.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

The only thing I ever wanted to be was a professional football player.

Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.

Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than the one with all the facts.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

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

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?

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

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.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.