Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

Nobody’s indispensable.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

I fully understand the expectations of the state governments. Thus, I am better placed to work closely with the chief ministers.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

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.

We should not underestimate ourselves, because if lots of individuals go together then we can accomplish almost anything.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

I have surrounded myself with very smart people.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.

I like school and I like learning.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

We came up with TDE. As competitive as rap is, and as much as we’re trying to exceed the standards we set for ourselves, we take their wins as our wins, too.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Too often we act – ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we’re giving them children who have, you know, they’re not ready to learn. And if they’re not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they’re behind.

Anybody who tells you that a two-day conference, you’re going to turn into the General Patton of leadership, they’re not telling you the truth. But you can learn the fundamentals; you can absolutely understand the fundamentals.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature.

Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit ‚MIA.‘ That’s the best part of it.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‚Automobile Magazine.‘ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.