I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone – both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.

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

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

I don’t want people to think of me as sexy.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can’t replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

I have always thought I was the best ever player.

Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play.

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

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

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

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

I think Mozart’s operas ‚The Marriage of Figaro‘ and ‚Don Giovanni‘ are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

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.

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.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

I like to be in control of how I look and how I feel and how I act.

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

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

I’m much more comfortable and confident running out on the field in front of 70,000 people instead of standing in front of a camera trying to say some lines. The people who do that as a profession are very talented because it’s certainly not easy.

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.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

You don’t have to be somebody different to be important. You’re important in your own right.

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That’s what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He’s a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

I heard that when Christina Aguilera went back to her prom, people, like, booed her. I can’t imagine going through that. If you know that’s going to happen, why put yourself in that situation? I’d rather play for 20,000 screaming people, you know?

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

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

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

People who want the most approval get the least and people who need approval the least get the most.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

I have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

I’m comfortable in my own skin, no matter how far it’s stretched. Ha ha.

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

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.

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.