I feel it’s my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

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.

I want to solidify as an artist and show that as I grow as a person and make mistakes and learn from them, I’m going to grow artistically.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

I’ve made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I’ve made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I’m proud of what I’ve done. In fact it’s been a good ride.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

It’s not enough to train today’s workforce. We also have to prepare tomorrow’s workforce by guaranteeing every child access to a world-class education.

I made the track ‚Si Tu Novio Te Deja Sola‘ before I met Balvin.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

I read every book there was on jazz, about the original players – King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and all those groups. At one time I was fairly well schooled in that… I could tell you who played where and when, historically, way before my time.

I’m just like you – I want to be a good human being. I’m doing my best, and I’m working at it. And I’m trying to be a Christian. I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‚I’m a Christian.‘ I always think, ‚Already? You’ve already got it?‘ I’m working at it. And at my age, I’ll still be working at it at 96.

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life?

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

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.

I think you’re working and learning until you die.

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.

I knew the second I finished the first record – ‚House Of Balloons‘ – and had all this material leftover that a trilogy would be best.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

All I do is make music.

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

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

Education is the best provision for old age.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

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.

We’re making the music that the people are asking us for.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There’s a lot of places left to go.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, ‚Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?‘ I was like, ‚I’d rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.‘ I always felt like an artist as well.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‚Lights Please‘ happens like that.

Since I was old enough to understand what a songwriter/producer is, I’ve had a curiosity about how Max Martin creates what he creates. I wanted to see that happen. I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn from him.

I’m a studio rat.

A producer gets the whole vision done from top to bottom, to making the record to having the record delivered to the world. That’s a producer.

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

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

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.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

There are times when I feel like I’m a traveling minister. I’m trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I’m such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

Libraries raised me.

Education is what you learn after you leave school.

Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.