You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

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

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

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.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the 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.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

We’re all dreamers.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, ‚Thus far and no farther.‘

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

I’m a painter in sound.

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

You are remembered for the rules you break.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Every driver is different, so I just hope whatever I do is going to be good enough, because it’s not that I just want to be with McLaren. I want to win with McLaren.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

Someone told me something that stuck with me: ‚You have to envision your life, and then go backwards.‘ I’ve been living by that motto for a while, so I see where I need to be. Now I’m just backtracking and trying to get back up there.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

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

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

Some people want to win races. Other people want to be President of the United States.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

It’s every girl’s dream to be a cover girl!

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

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.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.

I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me.

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.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.

I call architecture frozen music.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

If you ask people what they’ve always wanted to do, most people haven’t done it. That breaks my heart.