You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

How you played in yesterday’s game is all that counts.

As everything becomes digitized, there’s the idea that things that can’t be digitized become more valuable.

If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

Quitting doesn’t enter my mind.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

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.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

I never admire another’s fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

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.

I’m an inventor.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

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.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Well, you know, I’m the forever optimist.

I don’t see how people are comfortable with seeing other people be great. You can be happy for anybody, but what is your excuse to not want to be great? These people are great because they just say, ‚I’ma do that,‘ and they do it. That’s it. There’s no scientifical process.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

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

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

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

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

Belief creates the actual fact.

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.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

I don’t think about that. I wasn’t a kid growing up saying one day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech. That wasn’t on my mind. So what I do is the best work I can do.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world… If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

I was the guy on the swim team entertaining the bus on the way to the meets.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.