All I do is make music.

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.

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

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

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.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Having a simple career as a musician who liked music was good enough for me.

I’ve choreographed all of my movies.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

I love it when people say things to me in public and want to meet me, because I want to meet them! Early on, my manager told me, ‚If you want to sell 500,000 records, then go out there and meet 500,000 people.‘

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

My best country record only sold 200,000 copies.

I just want to keep writing music.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

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

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.

I don’t really like to call myself a brand, and I don’t like to think of myself as a brand. I’m a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that’s not my focus.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

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

I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He’s not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

The reason that I’m here at all is because of my relationship with my family and their encouragement of me to be a musician and to work hard. As long as I stay there in that space, I can do anything. That’s my truth.

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.

No rapper in the world from Jay-Z to Tupac to Biggie has 100 percent love on everything they do.

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

To me, the most important artists in my career are Arcangel and Balvin. Arcangel gave me the push, the respect in the streets.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, ‚Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?‘ I was like, ‚I’d rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.‘ I always felt like an artist as well.

I made the track ‚Si Tu Novio Te Deja Sola‘ before I met Balvin.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

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

To not be modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked with have done their best work by far with me.

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.‘

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

I never thought a career as a musician was possible.

I want to be like Bruce Springsteen or something, making songs that are relevant.

I wanted to sell a million records, and I sold a million records. I wanted to go platinum; I went platinum. I’ve been working nonstop since I was 15. I don’t even know how to chill out.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

I have certain signatures, certain cutting principles. It could be a raw-edged seam; it could be leaving the lining of sheepskin exposed so it’s not perfectly finished. I invent new ways to do it, but the end goal is always the same.

Tony Visconti and I had been wanting to work together again for a few years now. Both of us had fairly large commitments and for a long time we couldn’t see a space in which we could get anything together.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

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

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

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

I’m well past the age where I’m acceptable. 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.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.