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

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

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.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

I have a very eclectic iPod. So I’ve got my cardio people – so it’s anything from Beyonce to some Jay-Z to Janelle Monae, her song ‚Tightrope,‘ that’s a good cardio song. And then I’ve got Sting. I’ve got Mary J. Blige. I’ve got The Beatles. I’ve got Michael Jackson. I try to pick the songs that I personally love.

When I was a child I thought I saw an angel. It had wings and kinda looked like my sister. I opened the door so some light could come into the room, and it sort of faded away. My mother said it was probably my Guardian Angel.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music – which I did want to be fun, and I did want it to be about individuality, but please also take away from it that there’s no dream that’s too big.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

Mariah and Whitney Houston were my goddesses growing up.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

There’s always gonna be rock n‘ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n‘ roll records, and there will always be rock n‘ roll.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

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.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on the outside!

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

Strangely, some songs you really don’t want to write.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

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.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

Until it’s on the radio or online, it’s not real. With U2, our album isn’t finished until it’s in the stores.

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

To all the musicians, to the Academy, with all due respect, reggaeton is part of our Latin culture. And its representing as much as any other genre at the worldwide level.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

I don’t think of Kurt as ‚Kurt Cobain from Nirvana‘. I think of him as ‚Kurt‘. It’s something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

If music be the food of love, play on.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

Chicago gave me more music than any other city in America.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

‚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.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.