I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

Latin music is universal.

I remember auditioning for record labels and having them tell me, ‚Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we’ll talk.‘

Producing all my own songs and refusing to go to the hot producer. That’s the biggest risk I’ve taken so far.

Music is part of the life of fashion, too.

Proper sleep has helped me get to where I am today as an athlete, and it is something that I continue to rely on every day.

I can’t say this enough – the food that you put into your bodies can actually help you get better grades. And it can also affect your performance in sports and other activities too. You see, when you give your body the best possible fuel, you have more energy, you’re stronger, you think more quickly.

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There’s no tricks. It’s honesty with big melodies.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

I’m really happy and had such an amazing time performing at Super Bowl – wish I could relive it all over again.

I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.

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.

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

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they’re stuck in that safe place.

WIth football you can have up to 28 guys you consider starters, and if they can pick up the slack when some aren’t playing so well, you don’t have to turn those two game losing streaks into six-game losing streaks.

Honestly, I’d love to be remembered as one of the best to ever pick up a mic, but if I’m doing my part to lessen some racial tension I feel good about what I’m doing.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

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. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

‚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.

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

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

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.

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

On the field, aggression can sometimes be a positive emotion. It boosts performance and can lift your game. But over the years, I have learnt that restrained aggression is a better animal. That way, you will conserve your energy and won’t spend yourself quickly.

Computers double their performance every month.

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.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

I’m an iPod person.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

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

Oh yes. I’m an actor, so I just learn my lines, and show up and do it. I gave it a little bit of thought.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

If you watch any good player, they’re using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They’re moving in many dimensions at once.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

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.

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.

A Khaled record is always the best.

Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

My mother is a singer, my sisters all sing, my uncles are incredible singers and guitar players, so it’s just kind of been like my habitat.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.