Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

Even when I was a kid, everything I had was the best.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

I don’t know which will go first – rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

I really love the culture of hip-hop.

I love Wiz Khalifa.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

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

Man, I’m the No. 1 living and breathing rock star. I am Axl Rose; I am Jim Morrison; I am Jimi Hendrix.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

If it’s good music, it’s good music.

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

I’m the king of the anthems.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

Oh, 1994, April 27. There won’t be a day like that ever again. I mean, the sky was blue, with a blueness that had never been there before.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‚nirvana‘ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

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.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

You get to a point where it’s like you can’t really do anything right, and people will pick on you for whatever decisions you make, so I just try and take no notice and get on with my music.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

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

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

I’d love to do a duet, always wanted to work with Madonna, but she never asked.

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

I love stories about women.

I’ve always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I’m a sucker for it, whether it’s Linkin Park or Little Richard.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.