I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.

‚Nothin‘ on You‘ by B.o.B was the first song where I heard myself on the radio. I’d been trying my whole career to write a song like that, which incorporates live instruments with hip-hop and singing.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I’m very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

Once you’ve changed who you are or who you’ve portrayed in your music, the fans, they’ll catch it… Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.

I like being a writer.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

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.

If you play an instrument, it makes you a better singer. The more you play, the better you sing, the more you sing, the better you play.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

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.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

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

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.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

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!

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

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.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

The single most powerful thing I can be is to be myself.

What I’m hoping is that every album I’m going to do will give my audience something different, and that they’ll grow as I do.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

I’m an inventor.

I’m tough when I have to be, tender when I should be. When you find a really tough guy, he’s not a predator. He doesn’t have to prove himself. Guys who have to pretend to be tough, they ain’t. I’m tough.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.