I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

It is one thing to record an album but it’s a huge difference when people play it and listen to it and embrace it the way that I do. It has always been my dream to get my music out to the world and have people hear it.

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

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

I really like hip-hop and rap; that’s my main influence. I really wanna be more of a hip-hop artist.

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.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

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

I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I’ve stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

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

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 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.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I don’t know which will go first – rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I like Cardi B!

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

I have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

But, I’ve always loved John Mayer and I think T-Pain is brilliant.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

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

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Music is something no one can control.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.