I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

I’d love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

My kids are coming up in a different time then me. Interracial couples are of the norm. With me, it’s about making sure my kids understand the importance of education and having opportunities that I didn’t. My goal as a parent is to make sure they don’t take what they have for granted.

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‚Maria‘ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

If you ever see young artists, and they’re not sounding good, they sound good. They’re good singers. They wouldn’t be where they are if they didn’t sound good. It’s their nerves. Any time you see your favorite artist, and he’s or she’s screwing up or not hitting those notes, it’s not because she can’t hit it or she can’t sing; he or she is scared.

A ‚scream‘ is always just that – a noise and not music.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

A chorus is not easy.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

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.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

Only the shallow know themselves.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

Music is something no one can control.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we, as a people, can be engaged in.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

I’m turned on by guys who are cultured. That’ll keep me intrigued. They don’t have to have a single degree, but they should speak other languages or know things about other parts of the world or history or certain artists or musicians. I like to be taught. I like to sit on that side of the table.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‚leaders‘ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

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.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I’ve never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

I think that I’ve had a very strange life.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

When you walk into my classroom, I’m going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that’s the only way to prepare you for the real world.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

As an entrepreneur, as an investor, I’m trying to be as educated as I can to where the progression of technological capability is going and what it does to these different categories that, me as an artist and an influencer, I can get involved and bring value.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.