When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

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

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

All of my music is honest.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Our problem right now is that we’re so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you’ve got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky’s the limit.

Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

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

I was never focused on me, me, me all the time. I was always focused on somebody else.

I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

When we are well, we all have good advice for those who are ill.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

My imagination is a twisted place.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

I’ve never been a jealous person, and I’ve never felt built up by someone else’s failure – that’s a cheap thrill.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

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

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.