My brother had written ‚Ocean Eyes,‘ and we recorded it, basing all of the production around contemporary and lyrical dance. I think of most songs that way – if you can’t dance to a song, it’s not a song.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

When I’m stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

I could care less about the particular. I like to make music.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

Tony Visconti and I had been wanting to work together again for a few years now. Both of us had fairly large commitments and for a long time we couldn’t see a space in which we could get anything together.

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.

Producing all my own songs and refusing to go to the hot producer. That’s the biggest risk I’ve taken so far.

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn’t, so in the end they just released it themselves.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

The people in my songs are all me.

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

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.

It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.

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 write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

When I was performing the songs on ‚Kiss Land,‘ it was a great singalong. But there were moments where I realized some parts were catchier than the others. There’s maybe two choruses on all of ‚Kiss Land.‘

When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

I want to produce the music to a movie that I’m working on, like what Prince did with ‚Purple Rain.‘

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

If I could, I would not do anything else. I’d just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don’t even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

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

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

I’m a serious aficionada of country music – Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I’ve even written some songs. They haven’t done anything of mine yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

I wrote a song with Ed Sheeran that was kind of spontaneous.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture. It’s an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I used to write random little stupid things when I was five, but then the first song I really wrote was one called ‚Fingers Crossed,‘ which is on SoundCloud.