I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

There’s no substitute for the practice of meditation.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

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 do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

I have always been that girl in the back who doesn’t say anything.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Give yourself more opportunities for privacy, when you are not bombarded with duties and obligations. Privacy is not a rejection of those you love; it is your deserved respite for recharging your batteries.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

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.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

I’d be more frightened by not using whatever abilities I’d been given. I’d be more frightened by procrastination and laziness.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

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

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I’ve been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.

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.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.

Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

My whole life is a theater piece.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

I don’t want to wake up and be bored. That’s probably my greatest fear is to have nothing to do. What better job is there than to play quarterback for an NFL team, and certainly one that I’ve been on for a long time and had success with? I don’t plan on giving it up any time soon.