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.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

I hope that people around the world will be as inspired as I am to step up and to speak out on behalf of girls around the world who struggle to go to school.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

What is past is prologue.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

We based the look on rock ‚n roll right from the beginning.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Where love is, there God is also.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

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

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

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.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

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

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

If you are a leader, you should never forget that everyone needs encouragement. And everyone who receives it – young or old, successful or less-than-successful, unknown or famous – is changed by it.

Civil disobedience’s main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

All of my music is honest.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer – he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir are not superhuman. They are ordinary people with ordinary frailties. But therein lies the power of their example.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

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

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘