In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

They used to call me ‚Touchdown T.‘ I remember in high school, we had homecoming, and I got in front of the pep rally, and I told them, ‚I’m going to run for three touchdowns.‘ I ran for three touchdowns, kicked the extra point, and took myself out the game.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

Every setback means you’re one step closer to seeing the dream come to pass.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

I wouldn’t call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I’ll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I’m listening to music and think, ‚Oh, there’s not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.‘

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

I believe in singing.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

Dream and you shall become.

Perhaps one day I will go into space.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

In Hawaii, some of the biggest radio stations are reggae. The local bands are heavily influenced by Bob Marley.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

I always thought Johnny Carson was just brilliant, and I used to watch him and all the comics that would be on the show every night – and I’d dream about it being me.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

My music is influenced by L.A. culture.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love it.

My real dream is to have a whole, like, buy a whole piece of land. Imagine, like, a long driveway. Like, a cul de sac-type street, with maybe, like, seven houses. Me be right here. Have my mom be able to be right here. My brother over here. My girl’s grandmother and family right here. Friends over there. That’s my real dream.

I was sure I’d set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth – that I hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if ‚The Big Trail‘ had been a success and launched me as a star.

If you were to ask me what I want to do – I don’t want to be a celebrity, I want to make a difference.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life… it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

I’ve always felt music is the only way to give an instantaneous moment the feel of slow motion. To romanticise it and glorify it and give it a soundtrack and a rhythm.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

Philosophy is the highest music.

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.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

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

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they’re part of a family, not just a tour.

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.