My first job was singing on the Cas Walker radio show in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was about 10 years old, and I thought it was big time.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

My mama never wore a pair of pants when I was growing up, and now that’s all she wears. It was so funny for me when I first started seeing Mama wear pants. It was like it wasn’t Mama. Now I’ve bought her many a pantsuit because she just lives in them.

I began singing in dive bars and really small clubs. I dragged my piano down the stairs, and I went down the street with my keyboard, and I would go to every different dive bar that I could get to agree to let me play. I’d call and pretend I was Lady Gaga’s manager.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

My father gave me some advice when I was very young – whatever someone tells you in the future, don’t forget Pele is the best.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

I did stand-up for my grandparents every day when I was, like, eight.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

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.

When I was maybe eight or nine years old, I first learned about the climate crisis in school. My teachers taught me about it and we saw films and pictures of plastic in the ocean and extreme weather events. Those pictures were just stuck in my head; I thought, there is no point in anything.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

‚Nothin‘ on You‘ by B.o.B was the first song where I heard myself on the radio. I’d been trying my whole career to write a song like that, which incorporates live instruments with hip-hop and singing.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

I could imagine at a certain age, when I have no vocal cords left, that I would find a young man who could sing my parts for me. But I don’t see why I would stop.

I have dual citizenship; it just so happens I live in America. I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood, and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

I’d love to do a musical. I’ve been known to have a good step or two. I’m half Samoan, you know, and part of our culture is singing and dancing daily.

I used to make little movies when I was younger. I’d make my friends be in them and then edit them.

I had to get rich so I could sing like I was poor again.

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.

The vibe on ‚Starboy‘ comes from that hip-hop culture of braggadocio, from Wu-Tang and 50 Cent, the kind of music I listened to as a kid.

Sevier County is a great area.

When I was ten, I won the horseshoe-throwing contest at summer camp. I was also the Wiffle ball champion in my town.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.

Being part of a community with a church at its centre and singin‘ hymns is a great thing to do.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

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

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

‚Border‘ was the first movie that I watched on the big screen. It always takes me back to my childhood.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

An operatic voice is like no other.

As a kid, even I knew everything about my favourite cricketers. I used to know everything possible. Now I see kids knowing about me. It feels good.

What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it.

I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I’m singing now is what makes the money.

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother’s kitchen. If I don’t have time to cook, I’ll just read a cookbook.

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 enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

I signed up to be a musician, I want to perform, I want to sing.

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!

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it – no matter where it is.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

All of my brothers and sisters are very talented. They all sang all right.

I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president’s birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing ‚Happy Birthday,‘ like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, ‚Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!‘

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

I always wanted to know, and I always used to daydream, about what it would be like to stand on a really big stage and sing songs for a lot of people, songs that I had written… Daydreaming was kind of my No. 1 thing when I was little, because I didn’t have much of a social life going on.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.