You should treat a muse like a fairy.

Every day, the people I meet inspire me… every day, they make me proud… every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

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

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.

Muhammad Ali is a legend, a hero of mine.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I know the blessing of having a dad who played 16 years in the league. That experience, and seeing him as an example, let me know that it’s possible. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

When you’re around me and really see that all I do is live and breathe for my work, it’s not strange, it’s just Gaga.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

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.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.

So many people have this idea: I want to achieve something great or be somebody great. And they neglect the step that leads to greatness. They don’t honor this step at this moment because they have this idea of some future moment where they are going to be great.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

People want to listen to a message, word from Jah. This could be passed through me or anybody. I am not a leader. Messenger. The words of the songs, not the person, is what attracts people.

You might win some, you might lose some. But you go in, you challenge yourself, you become a better man, a better individual, a better fighter.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.

In cricket, my superhero is Sachin Tendulkar. He has always been my hero and will continue to remain so. Apart from him and outside cricket, my mother has remained my inspiration. Whatever difficult time I had faced, she was always there for me. She has given me all the strength. She maintained her composure and supported me in tough times.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

I wanted to get a job being creative, and I did.

Today, I’d like to talk to Bob Marley. I’d just like to ask him what was his method. Bob is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I don’t know if people understand how powerful his songs are and the simplicity and genius behind them, from ‚Redemption Song‘ to ‚Is This Love?‘ and ‚I Shot the Sheriff.‘

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘

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.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

I believe that one person can make a difference.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Music is really driving my whole life.

I find a lot of inspiration through visuals. When I was 12, I saw Aurora’s ‚Runaway‘ music video. Something inside me clicked, like, ‚That is what I want to do, no matter whether it goes anywhere or not.‘

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

The influence of ‚Hidden Fortress‘ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.