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

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’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

I would love to get Rihanna on a Khaled song. That’s my friend, but every time I’m around her, I get shy.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia.

Music is in my DNA!

My style influences my music and everything around me.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

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.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

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.

John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down.

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 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.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

My mother is a singer, my sisters all sing, my uncles are incredible singers and guitar players, so it’s just kind of been like my habitat.

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It’s by the sea, there’s a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.

You get to a point where it’s like you can’t really do anything right, and people will pick on you for whatever decisions you make, so I just try and take no notice and get on with my music.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

It was a strike against me that I didn’t wear baggy jeans and jerseys and that I never hustled, never sold drugs.

As for my stuff, I’m just doing guest verses for other people’s records. I try to stay recording, because if I don’t, I get rusty.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

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

I’m a big fan of songs like Joe Cocker’s ‚You Are So Beautiful‘ and Eric Clapton’s ‚Wonderful Tonight‘ – songs that go straight to the point.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

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.

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.

‚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.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

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

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

Music is like film to me.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Men don’t really like skinny, do they?

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 don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

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.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.

I listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘

There’s no difference between movies and television. None at all. Except in a lot of cases, television’s much better than movies.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they’re part of a family, not just a tour.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

I became a beach bum.