I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

Today, I’d like to talk to Bob Marley. I’d just like to ask him what was his method. Bob is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I don’t know if people understand how powerful his songs are and the simplicity and genius behind them, from ‚Redemption Song‘ to ‚Is This Love?‘ and ‚I Shot the Sheriff.‘

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

Life is a song to me.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

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.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

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

For the chorus of ‚Secrets,‘ we used The Romantics‘ ‚Talking in Your Sleep‘ and ‚Pale Shelter‘ by Tears for Fears. It’s like hip-hop: just grab it.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

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

It’s important to love in hip hop.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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.

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 has the power to inspire the world.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I’ve never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

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.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.

I believe in singing.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love 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!

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

However, there’s no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

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

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

I make good music for long journeys.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

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.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

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

It was always a plan that we were going to have a retail side with what were doing musically, like an Apple store or Nike Town. I wanted something where you can come get everything – ‚Marathon‘ or ‚All Money‘ or ‚Crenshaw‘ – and make it like an experience. Especially with what Crenshaw and Slauson meant to my story.

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

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.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

My range is limited.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

I’m a big fan of songs like Joe Cocker’s ‚You Are So Beautiful‘ and Eric Clapton’s ‚Wonderful Tonight‘ – songs that go straight to the point.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

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.

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

I don’t intend to stop making music.

‚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.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.