I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

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 don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.

I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

I think Mozart’s operas ‚The Marriage of Figaro‘ and ‚Don Giovanni‘ are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

When ‚Paul’s Boutique‘ came out, I was one of the fans that didn’t get it.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I’m just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way yall need Jesus.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That’s an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can’t cheat real connection. It’s built up slowly. It’s about trust and time.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

Bob Dylan is like an alien on this earth, and I love him! I cried when I saw him play live because I was so close to him.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

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

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

Key is never be afraid of being yourself. Never!

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

Latin music is universal.

I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

‚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.

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

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.

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.

Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

I don’t like to feel like I’m in a club when I’m in my car and I turn on the radio. Anything that ceases to be a song and just sounds like house music kind of stresses me out.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

I want to keep making records as long as I can, but I don’t know how long you can be taken seriously in rap.

As for my stuff, I’m just doing guest verses for other people’s records. I try to stay recording, because if I don’t, I get rusty.

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

I’ve always been – you know, my personality is motivating and encouraging. And so I’m just being who God made me to be.

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

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

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

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.