All of my music is honest.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

I don’t want to use my creative energy on somebody else’s user interface.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

The people in my songs are all me.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine – it kinda sucks the life out of music.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

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

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

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

Let’s embrace being not normal!

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

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

Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

I never want to change so much that people can’t recognize me.

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

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.

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

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.