I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

I’ll be like Bob Hope, touring when I’m 100.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

I don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

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

I just want to keep writing music.

I always say I wanna work with Alicia Keys. I’m in awe of her.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

I’d like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

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

Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

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.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

It’s important to love in hip hop.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

I work hard for the audience. It’s entertainment. I don’t need validation.

When Jerry Springer thinks you’ve gone too far, my friends, you have gone too far.

I live half the year on Necker, a tiny island in the Caribbean, and it’s always full of people in party mode. Everyone comes up to the big house, and we’ll be dancing until the early hours to the island’s band, the Front Line.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we’re a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn’t being ironic.

I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It’s what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

I say, ‚Yeah, Taylor Swift.‘ I think she is a smart, beautiful girl. I think she’s making all the right moves. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’s surrounded with wonderful people. Her songs are great. She keeps herself anchored. She knows who she is, and she’s living and standing by that.

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.

‚House of Balloons‘ was actually supposed to have more songs than it does.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

I knew the second I finished the first record – ‚House Of Balloons‘ – and had all this material leftover that a trilogy would be best.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

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.

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

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