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

In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

I’m chasing perfection.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

Sometimes, getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is the hardest part of the day – it all just hurts.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

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

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer to your goal.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.

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.

Don’t be a spectator, don’t let life pass you by.

It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.

It is no use saying, ‚We are doing our best.‘ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Because my career is so important, I think I make a lot of – I wouldn’t call them sacrifices, but just concessions for my job. I love what I do, and I want to do it for a long time.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

WWE is a space where I thrived, and I loved, and I still do. I love connecting with an audience; that is the greatest thing about going back to WWE.

I know a lot of people say they always believed they could get into F1, but I didn’t quite believe that, certainly not when I was 7 and maybe not until I was 14. It was always so far away.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

Passion is needed for any great work, and for the revolution, passion and audacity are required in big doses.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you’re allowed to fail.

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.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

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

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

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.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

When we make progress quickly, it feeds our emotions. Then, when there’s a period of waiting or we hit a plateau, we find out how committed we really are and whether we’re going to see things through to the finish or quit.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

With drive and a bit of talent, you can move mountains. I know. I’ve done it.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

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