John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit ‚MIA.‘ That’s the best part of it.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you’re allowed to fail.

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

It is one thing to record an album but it’s a huge difference when people play it and listen to it and embrace it the way that I do. It has always been my dream to get my music out to the world and have people hear it.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Five or six songs leaked from the original version of ‚Encore.‘ So I had to go in and make new songs to replace them.

If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma. Them’s fightin‘ words.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

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.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

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

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record 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.

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

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

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?

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

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.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

I’m an iPod person.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

I live half the year on Necker, a tiny island in the Caribbean, and it’s always full of people in party mode. Everyone comes up to the big house, and we’ll be dancing until the early hours to the island’s band, the Front Line.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

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.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

A chorus is not easy.

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.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists – Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He’s not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.

Music is always a commentary on society.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

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.

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.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

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

People don’t realize what they had till it’s gone. Like President Kennedy, there was no one like him, the Beatles, and my man Elvis Presley. I was the Elvis of boxing.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

Once you’ve changed who you are or who you’ve portrayed in your music, the fans, they’ll catch it… Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

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.

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

I was 19 or 20 when The Beatles were at their peak, and I was coming up to the peak of my career, too. I was also the first footballer to have long hair, and that’s how I got my nickname ‚the Fifth Beatle.‘