Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

I’m not a sheep.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

Hawaiian music is beautiful and simple.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you’ve got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky’s the limit.

I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

I’m thrilled to have Corona join me on my ‚X100PRE‘ Tour to give my fans a taste of Corona Estereo Beach and showcase their support of Latin music. It’s not solely about the music – it’s about the culture, creativity, and contributing to the movement that connects us all together.

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

My whole life, I’ve sung and listened to music, and since the beginning, I’ve had iTunes and used Apple Music for streaming.

I don’t even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.

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.

‚House of Balloons‘ was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

Kanye West is my favorite artist.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

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.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

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

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

I love dresses, and I’ve definitely thought about designing them someday. I just want to make sure that I wait until the time is perfect and I can do it right.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‚Huh. It works. It makes sense.‘

Music is really driving my whole life.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

I’m an iPod person.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

There’s a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

If it’s good music, it’s good music.

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.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that’s what makes them extraordinary.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.