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

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

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

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

Mick Fleetwood was one of my first interviews. And if you’ve ever talked to that dude, he’s the sweetest guy in the world – he’s just a trip.

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.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

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

But there is a difference between cozying up to power and being close to power.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.

He who has great power should use it lightly.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

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

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

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.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!

When restraint and courtesy are added to strength, the latter becomes irresistible.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

You go to a festival, you know you’re not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I’ve made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

No press, no television. If my mom calls and says, ‚Did you hear about?‘ I don’t want to know nothing about anything that is going on in relation to music. I shut it all off.

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‚Maria‘ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

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.

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.