I believe in singing.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists – Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

How I love David Bowie.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

When I won the first Grammy, there was no other feeling like that feeling. It just made me feel like I came so far, like that was just a dream a few years before that, and then it was happening right then.

A good song never gets old.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

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

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

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

I never listen to ‚Nevermind.‘ I haven’t listened to it since we put it out. That says something.

I believe that I have received Jesus Christ into my heart. I believe that he has covered all of my sins.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

I’ve been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what’s going on in their love lives.

Faith… must be enforced by reason… when faith becomes blind it dies.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

I know I got angels watchin me from the other side.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we’re continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we’ve taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

I don’t think of Kurt as ‚Kurt Cobain from Nirvana‘. I think of him as ‚Kurt‘. It’s something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

Man is only great when he acts from passion.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

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.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

I have been singing randomly, obsessively, obnoxiously for as long as I can remember.

I’d love to do a duet, always wanted to work with Madonna, but she never asked.

My nails are my rhythm section when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

I always feel like it’s two key ingredients when it comes to following your dreams, making something happen that the average person deems difficult. If you truly believe it, that’s step one. Step two, is, you know, the hard work that goes along with it.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

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

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‚Well gee, let’s not mess this up.‘ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That’s what’s big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.

I think if I did something in the pop world right now, it would be for Rihanna. I’d love to do something production wise for her.

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, some way, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

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

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.‘

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I’m just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way yall need Jesus.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

Hawaiian music is beautiful and simple.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

‚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.