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

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

I listen to music all day every day. I can’t not listen to music. It’s kind of scary how much I listen to music, but it’s what I love, and it’s all I care about, so I’m good with it.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

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

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero.

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

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 know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He’s not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us – aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

No sanction can stand against ignited minds.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that’s what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television… I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,‘ he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. ‚Shake it off. Stop complainin‘. Stop grumblin‘. Stop cryin‘. We are going to press on. We have work to do.

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

Labor gives birth to ideas.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Music is in my DNA!

I’m a painter in sound.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.