A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

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.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

My experiences in life are getting bigger and better. The more stuff I do, the more stuff I talk about – having kids, traveling, going through relationship problems, dealing with things in my own family. All that stuff builds character.

‚Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

Love is a state of being.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

To get a hold on boys you must be their friend.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down.

It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.

Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved. He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.

I left Mainz after 18 years and thought, ‚Next time, I will work with a little less of my heart.‘ I said that because we all cried for a week. The city gave us a goodbye party, and it lasted a week.

I love making new friends and I respect people for a lot of different reasons.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

I’ve got a crush on my backing singer.

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.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

I think that you can love people without it being the great love.

If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.

Some people are making music just for numbers and views.

He that has not got a wife is not yet a complete man.

Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

I wrote ‚Channel Orange‘ in two weeks. The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

The human heart is the same the world over.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

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

Fame may go by and – so long, I’ve had you.

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

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

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

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Actually, you have to be a little bit in love with your leading man and vice versa. If you’re going to portray love, you have to feel it. You can’t do it any other way. But you don’t carry it beyond the set.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.