After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

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

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

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.

I make good music for long journeys.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

Everyone I look up to is bringing me into the tech world. You’d be surprised by all the music people in it, invested in it.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit ‚MIA.‘ That’s the best part of it.

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

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.

I just want to keep writing music.

What I’m hoping is that every album I’m going to do will give my audience something different, and that they’ll grow as I do.

A yawn is a silent shout.

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

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.

Because you have things like ‚American Idol‘ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

Music is really driving my whole life.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

In Puerto Rico we dance to everything.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

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

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

I want to keep making records as long as I can, but I don’t know how long you can be taken seriously in rap.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

Man, I’m the No. 1 living and breathing rock star. I am Axl Rose; I am Jim Morrison; I am Jimi Hendrix.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy about the breeding season.