A lot of the records you buy, there’s nothing you can hold in your hand, it’s all 1’s and 0’s, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.

All I do is make music.

I think I have every piece of music Bob Marley ever made.

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I’d become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.

Madonna and I are very different. Just saying. We’re very different. I wouldn’t make that comparison at all, and I don’t mean to disrespect Madonna: she’s a nice lady, and she’s had a fantastic, huge career – biggest pop star of all time.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

Over the years I’ve met quite a few big rappers. Then it exploded with 50 Cent, and I did a book with him. It’s always a strange meeting of two worlds, it’s very exciting.

Super-envious of the fact that Daft Punk can wear robot helmets and be one of the most famous bands in the world, while also understanding that will never be my situation.

Ever since the beginning of rock and roll, there’s been an Axl Rose. And it’s just boring. It’s totally boring to me.

I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

I’m like a rock singer with one-night stands on the road.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

In pop music, the public usually see the results – the hit records, the Grammy Awards performances, the concert tours – but not all the work that goes into getting into the spotlight. And not everyone realizes that, even if you have a lot of talent, chances are you won’t make it.

I think Kenny Chesney or Garth Brooks would be the coolest duet partners. I look up to them so much for their work ethics.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

Stylistically, I love make-up. I love doing my own make-up and stuff, but clothes-wise, I actually didn’t ever really care. Initially the fashion world was more interested in me than the music world, which was strange when I first started singing.

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

It’s much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won’t keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don’t know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we’ve got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, ‚Is this it? Are we still relevant?‘

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

You get to a certain age, and you are forbidden access. You’re not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines; you’re not going to get played on radio, and you’re not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

You don’t hear no artists from Compton showing vulnerability.

A development deal is where they’re giving you recording time and money to record, but not promising that they’ll put an album out.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

Strangely, some songs you really don’t want to write.

Streaming is a really big market for me. We’ve been doing great in the streaming market, so it’s not something I want to alienate at all. Streaming counts now. They’re treating artists the way we deserve to be treated.

I used to really love Fiend, but he stopped. He just stopped. Every time he had a project, every project – ‚There’s One In Every Family,‘ ‚Street Life‘ – I had to have them. And he just stopped. And that was disappointing, ‚cause that was my favorite rapper at one time.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I’d say probably in the early ’70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, ‚cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.

Because I’m not in a record deal, I don’t have to operate in an album format.

I seen a lot of artists be hot for a minute, and then that’s it, and somebody else come in.

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.

I’ve had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, ‚Your music sucks, you don’t know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don’t know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.‘

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.

I want to make pop cool again, and the only way I can do that is by being ambitious and grand.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

I’m gonna be making records anyway, even if I had to sell ‚em out of the trunk of my car. I’m that kind of musician and singer.

I actually met The Game in my hood on Crenshaw and Slauson. I was outside on the block with 20 of my homies. I see the Range Rover, and we all walked up to his car. I handed him my CD.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

I think the first thing you should know is that nobody in country music ‚made it‘ the same way. It’s all different. There’s no blueprint for success, and sometimes you just have to work at it.

I think Ye is important to hip-hop.

I have no desire at all to become the winningest coach at Notre Dame. The record belongs to Knute Rockne or some other coach in the future.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

Even before Snapchat, you go back into my career from Day One or interview people that knew me for 25 years, they’re going to tell you I’ve been DJ Khaled my whole life.

Some artists just ruin their voices because they don’t know any better.

When I was writing the Destiny’s Child songs, it was a big thing to be that young and taking control. And the label at the time didn’t know that we were going to be that successful, so they gave us all control. And I got used to it.

Reggaeton is something else – it is part of pop culture. It is something very big that I don’t believe will ever die.

I remember auditioning for record labels and having them tell me, ‚Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we’ll talk.‘

I think that when you’re making your way up in the music industry, you have all these heroes and the reasons why they are your heroes. As soon as you get into the industry, your guidelines change a little bit. For me, my heroes now are great people first and great artists second.

I’m not going to do anything crazy, but I want to do music that I’m passionate about. I’m finally at an age where I can do the music that I grew up loving, which was urban pop, ’90s music. I grew up listening to the divas, so I’m very happy to finally do urban pop. I hope that it’s received well, and it has been so far.

Surface R&B doesn’t work any more. The whole heartthrob thing, songs about unrealistic love and tearing your shirt off every show – that’s not really where it’s at any more. It’s becoming harder for those guys to sell records, and harder for them to succeed.

My records are borderline dance records. They’ve got a real electro-rock heart and soul, and the vibe of the sentiment is pop, but there’s a lot of people that were like, ‚This is a dance record.‘

I probably could have toured off ‚Trilogy‘ for the rest of my life. It definitely changed the culture. No one can do a trilogy again without thanking The Weeknd.

I think country music is popular – has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.