You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

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.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn’t make your house look any better.

I think any man who lets a woman pick what he should wear… I mean, you gotta draw the line somewhere as a man. I see these guys, ‚My wife told me to wear this!‘ And I just shake my head.

I’ve done the bad-boy thing. It was fun for a good three months. But the thing about bad boys is, you have to keep in mind, you’re never gonna marry a bad boy.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.

It is better to be deceived by one’s friends than to deceive them.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

I fall in love every day. Not with people but with situations.

I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

I’d rather tell you how I really feel.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I call architecture frozen music.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t have to limit you.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

I’m not the girl who always has a boyfriend. I’m the girl who rarely has a boyfriend.

Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

I always knew that St. Jude was an amazing organization but meeting the kids and seeing how the hospital works first hand was truly beautiful. It doesn’t feel like a regular hospital all dreary and sad. It’s a colorful, beautiful, comfortable, fun place to live and the energy is wonderful.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.