I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

I’ve been lucky – all the ads I’ve got, I’ve got to be myself. I haven’t had to act too much or tried too hard to be someone I’m not. I think that’s why people sort of like them. Even the Fastrack ads I did with Genelia.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

I love singing. I love it, and it doesn’t feel like a chore. It’s an expression.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

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

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

I love to play. And fortunately, I don’t know a lot of musicians that suck. I know a bunch of really good ones, and they’re always up for playing.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I’m putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

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.‘

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

My whole life is a theater piece.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

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’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

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

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

There has to be something in every role that interests you.

I like being a writer.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft – that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

I made an album I’m very proud of, and that’s about it.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

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.

I’ve made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I’ve made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I’m proud of what I’ve done. In fact it’s been a good ride.

Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off.

So many girls come up and say to me, ‚I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m obsessed.‘ That’s the coolest compliment to me.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

That’s why I hate to get started in these jam sessions. I’m always the last one to leave.

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

I believe in singing.

I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

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.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs – that’s where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that’s very cool.

I am criticised for not celebrating my goals enough. I am very happy from within, very calm. I just don’t celebrate. I celebrate inside.