I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

I was arrested for lip-syncing karaoke.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

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

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you’re going drama just because everybody else does it. You do it to challenge yourself. You do it because, naturally, in the profession of acting, you want to show growth. You want to say that you take the craft seriously.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.

I believe in being an innovator.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

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

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn’t have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that – except I couldn’t afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.

Everyone I look up to is bringing me into the tech world. You’d be surprised by all the music people in it, invested in it.

They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus, that means guns, sex, lies, video tapes, but if I talk about God my record won’t get played Huh?

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Twitter is great to connect with fans and be transparent. I enjoy that aspect about it. But really, I’m still trying to figure it out.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

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.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

If you don’t feel safe as a child, you can’t learn.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

I believe in singing.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.