Music is like film to me.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Obama’s not Jesus. He can’t walk on water.

I say, ‚Yeah, Taylor Swift.‘ I think she is a smart, beautiful girl. I think she’s making all the right moves. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’s surrounded with wonderful people. Her songs are great. She keeps herself anchored. She knows who she is, and she’s living and standing by that.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

I think the word rich is all relative.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

All art is quite useless.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

That thing about being an icon, the fifth Beatle, I just found it so freaky.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

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.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

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.

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

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

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.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

I knew the second I finished the first record – ‚House Of Balloons‘ – and had all this material leftover that a trilogy would be best.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.

I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man’s, I mean.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

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.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

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 don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

So many girls come up and say to me, ‚I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m obsessed.‘ That’s the coolest compliment to me.

I believe in singing.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

The vibe on ‚Starboy‘ comes from that hip-hop culture of braggadocio, from Wu-Tang and 50 Cent, the kind of music I listened to as a kid.

Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

For as one star another far exceeds, So souls in heaven are placed by their deeds.

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

My whole life, I’ve sung and listened to music, and since the beginning, I’ve had iTunes and used Apple Music for streaming.

I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

Environment is very important to me. Sometimes I have to perform during the day for festivals, and my music does not work in the daytime. It is nighttime music.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

I make good music for long journeys.

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.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.