I don’t know how the rap game is, because I’m a fan of reality, and the rap game’s entertainment.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

I enjoy driving on the sim, doing stuff like that, staying at home.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

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

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.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

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

I’ve definitely seen bands before they made money kind of change their thing on the next tour, and I prefer it when it’s a little more raw.

I wish all teenagers can filter through songs instead of turning to drugs and alcohol.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

Stand-up comedy is mine: it’s my entity; it’s my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.

Music is really driving my whole life.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

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

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you’re always going to find a hip-hop tape; that’s all I buy, that’s all I live, that’s all I listen to, that’s all I love.

I just want to keep writing music.

I’ve always loved the showmanship of professional wrestling. While I love making movies, I love that platform, too.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

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

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

I don’t just listen to rap.

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.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

I saw MotoGP on TV first, before I saw F1 and other types of car racing. It’s what I got more into. It was cool, there was good, exciting racing.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

It’s a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That’s where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

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.

My whole life, I’ve sung and listened to music, and since the beginning, I’ve had iTunes and used Apple Music for streaming.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

‚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.‘

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

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

There’s been people who’ve rapped and produced – like Kanye – but I don’t feel like on the rapping side there’s ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

Pop music will never be low brow.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

I like a drama.