When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

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’d been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it’s environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ‚ambient music.‘ But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

Usually, when you go in to make a record, you have 30 songs, and you record 30 of them, and 12 of them make it to the record.

It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Producing all my own songs and refusing to go to the hot producer. That’s the biggest risk I’ve taken so far.

For me it’s always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

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.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

I want to produce the music to a movie that I’m working on, like what Prince did with ‚Purple Rain.‘

My brother had written ‚Ocean Eyes,‘ and we recorded it, basing all of the production around contemporary and lyrical dance. I think of most songs that way – if you can’t dance to a song, it’s not a song.

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer’s block… Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can’t get it out, I start feeling bad about myself – a lot of self-loathing.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

I feel it’s my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.

I’ve been composing music all my life and if I’d been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

I always have to be writing.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love it.

The way ‚Lux‘ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer. I’m a writer.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

There appears to be something to do with vehicles and movement that stimulates my writing.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.

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

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Sonnymoon and Quadrants are a couple of bands that really inspire me in terms of the melodics of things and certain tones and just what feels good. It takes me back to the type of music that I grew up on in my household. We played a lot of gangsta rap, but we also played a lot of oldies, and I think that mix is part of what inspires my sound.

When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I’m such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

We’re making the music that the people are asking us for.

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.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

I don’t really get into a big intellectual analysis of why I am going to do a certain script or not.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.