Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Let’s embrace being not normal!

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

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

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

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.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

But, I’ve always loved John Mayer and I think T-Pain is brilliant.

Latin music is universal.

You fail only if you stop writing.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I love Chris Brown. He’s a superstar. He’s one of the best singers out there.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

My favorite record label of all time is Motown. That era of music was my favorite.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

I always felt like there was a certain standard of music that I had to do from the beginning, even when I didn’t have the recognition that I have now.

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.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

If you play an instrument, it makes you a better singer. The more you play, the better you sing, the more you sing, the better you play.

In art the best is good enough.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists – Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

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

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

If music be the food of love, play on.

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

Environment is very important to me. Sometimes I have to perform during the day for festivals, and my music does not work in the daytime. It is nighttime music.

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

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

I think that promoting insecurity in the form of plastic surgery is infinitely more harmful than an artistic expression related to body modification.

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