I don’t think of Kurt as ‚Kurt Cobain from Nirvana‘. I think of him as ‚Kurt‘. It’s something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

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

I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

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.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

We can all be successful and make money, but when we die, that ends. But when you are significant is when you help other people be successful. That lasts many a lifetime.

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.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet; I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She’s sort of become my fairy godmother.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists – Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

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.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we’re continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we’ve taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

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.

I can dance to just about anything.

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

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’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

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

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

Liverpool is a club with a big, big, big history, and all the clubs in the world have a big history if the present is not too successful. If you have never had success, then nobody knows how it is, but in Liverpool, everybody knows how it was.

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.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

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’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.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.