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.

Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

I love good, loud speakers.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

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

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

The effect of music on fashion has been immense, especially hip-hop and urban music.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

I don’t just listen to rap.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

I just love working with Eminem. He’s just one of my favorite rappers, and his lyrics – he’s a true poet, and I enjoy that about him.

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.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

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

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

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

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.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

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.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia.

Most of my songs have names of people I’ve met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.

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.

There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

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.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

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

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Music is always a commentary on society.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

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

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

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.

I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

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.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.