We don’t make music – it makes us.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, ‚What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?‘ And, ‚How does creativity apply across the board?‘

I do things I love doing. Sometimes that is maybe going out to have a drink with friends, going out partying or whatever.

Man, that record came out and was real big in Memphis. They started playing it, and it got real big. Don’t know why-the lyrics had no meaning.

Man is only great when he acts from passion.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

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.

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

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I always thought about working in England because of the kind of football, the intensity of football. Liverpool was first choice.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

Music, for me, is vital. Punjabi, Bollywood, Sufi, RnB… I listen to it all. When I’m not listening to music, you will find me chatting with friends. Off the field, I just let my instincts take over. I certainly don’t think about batting, or which bowlers I’m going to face.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

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.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

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.

O, had I but followed the arts!

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

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.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

Football is unconditional love.

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

I always wanted to operate at the highest altitude, just in terms of hip-hop and the music.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.