When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

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.

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to.

Life loves the liver of it.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

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.

My drive is other people’s success.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

I love to play. And fortunately, I don’t know a lot of musicians that suck. I know a bunch of really good ones, and they’re always up for playing.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Whenever I’m around some who is modest, I think, ‚Run like hell and all of fire.‘ You don’t want modesty, you want humility.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

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 I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band – or at least in a Pixies cover band.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

I feel real good because it’s about representing the young world and how to uplift each other and how to push us to be greater and make sure we don’t fall or get trapped or get in trouble, you know what I mean. Stay focused, you know what I mean.

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I would say raising capital is one of the weakest things for most entrepreneurs.

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

I like the fact that Melbourne always seems to support their chefs and promote them in ways I find really admirable.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Do not be afraid to ask for help. Nobody gets through college on their own.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles.

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

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

‚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 was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

When I got depressed, I watched Bruce Lee movies. I learned everything from Bruce Lee.