A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I’ve stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

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

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

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

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

I like Cardi B!

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

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.

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

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

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.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

I never played with anything like toys.

It’s terrifying to play your favorite band’s song in front of your favorite band.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

I call architecture frozen music.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

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.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we’re a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn’t being ironic.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

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

I wouldn’t call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I’ll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I’m listening to music and think, ‚Oh, there’s not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.‘

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

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

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.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.