You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

I enjoy wearing pins, and nobody tells me to do it.

I feel like when I try to fit in, it comes across as not genuine, and that is not good. I’d rather just do me and have people say, ‚Oh. That’s interesting,‘ than try to fit in.

The ‚Maddox Jolie-Pitt‘ Foundation’s work is inspired by our children and their connections to particular countries.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

People want to feel hopeful.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

If you consider the definition of authenticity, it’s saying something and actually doing it. I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

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.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

Just try new things. Don’t be afraid. Step out of your comfort zones and soar, all right?

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

When I heard ‚Jesus, Take the Wheel,‘ I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you’re a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

I’m a painter in sound.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

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

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Aim for the highest.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.