I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands. I had posters on my wall. I had Beatles records.

An operatic voice is like no other.

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 can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

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

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I don’t want people at my shows to come out and say, ‚I just saw a cool show.‘ I want them to say, ‚I had fun at the show.‘ I want it to be a collaborative thing and be part of the audience and have them be part of me. I try to interact with everyone there and have them be equal to me because they are.

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion.

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.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

I was a dancer for many years. I was a premier dancer with ‚Porgy and Bess,‘ the opera. And I taught dance some, in different places.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

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

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

I’d like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!

Music is something no one can control.

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.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

In Puerto Rico we dance to everything.

I listen to music all day every day. I can’t not listen to music. It’s kind of scary how much I listen to music, but it’s what I love, and it’s all I care about, so I’m good with it.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

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.

In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s called ‚Scalia/Ginsburg.‘ The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.

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.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

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

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

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

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

I was very camera shy. People like hot girls, so I put my music to hot girls and it just became a trend. The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me.

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

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

I’m the king of the anthems.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

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.

Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

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.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn’t even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.

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

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.