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

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

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.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

I hate the idea of genres.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

If I heard someone else singing like me, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

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

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

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

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn’t want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

My only scheme was to be a rapper.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

When I do listen to music, I’m more prone to listen to the people I’ve always listened to: George Jones, Otis Redding, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

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.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I’d listen to Italian music.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

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

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

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.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

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.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

Imagination rules the world.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.