You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Don’t talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.

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

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

I know that I always wanted things. I was always proud of my people, proud of my home, but I always wanted more. I think most people do.

The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.

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.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.

I’m not as goal obsessed as I am process obsessed.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Everybody could be an entrepreneur, but very few will become very rich entrepreneurs.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

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.

I can die a happy man never having been president of the United States of America. But it doesn’t mean I won’t run.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Big results require big ambitions.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

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

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Do all you can to make your dreams come true.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

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.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Every artist was first an amateur.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

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.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

People have to understand one thing: at the age of 18, I arrived at a dream club like Manchester United. It was a dream come true. But, even at that moment, I was thinking about playing in England for some years and then going to play in Spain. Even at that time I was thinking that way, and I always gave 100% everything.

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way – I hope it never will.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

In my heart, I’m confident I could make a good president.

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

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!