I only get involved with projects as a producer if I feel creatively inspired.
All this talk about inspiration and moment is nonsense.
Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.
I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
It's like something happened to you that caused you to do what you do...you heard something somewhere, you felt something about this music that was definitely part of your own vision. That's what the whole thing is like.
Inspiration is God making contact with itself.
I get inspired by many different things.
I knew I wanted to be a rapper when I was, like, 5.
A couple of days working with Joe Jonas, I thought, 'This guy is a slayer of a singer; he's really funny, goofy, and sexy. We need to write that.' And that led to 'Cake By The Ocean.'
In L.A., you have to drive; in New York, you can do it on foot. The variety, the potential, of people is in your face. Like any good creator, you want to steal everything.
I think it's very rare, as an actor, that you get to a script, or an idea of a script, and you go, "Oh, I just have to do that!" It fell into place very quickly.
When I was making my first record there would be something that would come out that would inspire you, you know? You'd see someone on TV or on the radio.
New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.
Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.
I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.
There's a Norwegian equivalent to 'BBC Introducing' called 'P3 Untouched,' and I remember when they played the first song I ever wrote that I'd put online. I was 16 at that point. That was the first moment where I was like, 'Oh, maybe this is something I want to do more of.'
It's really hard for me to finish a song unless I have a strong visual in my head while I'm writing it.
Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.
Creativity has a lot to do with the main idea. Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won't invite what's not there to begin with.
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.
My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.
The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.
It's weird: I don't really know where I pull my inspiration from. I think it's N.E.R.D.
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
