I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

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.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

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

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.

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

It’s always great to perform at home in the good ol‘ U.S.A.

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 have a lot of friends who do what I do. Either they’re actresses or singers or things like that.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

There’s been people who’ve rapped and produced – like Kanye – but I don’t feel like on the rapping side there’s ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.

There’s a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.

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

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

‚Wrecking Ball‘ is a great song.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

A lot of my heartbreak songs are inspired by things my sisters are going through, or friends.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

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.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

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.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

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.

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.

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

Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.

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

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

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.

The kindness that’s been shown to me, by doctors as well as my family and my friends, it’s really saved my life.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

Music is in my DNA!

U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

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

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.