I feel it’s my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

There are times when I feel like I’m a traveling minister. I’m trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world.

I think you’re working and learning until you die.

I have taken taking my music to labels for years, and everyone just thought it was creepy. They thought the images with the music were weird and verging on psychotic.

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

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

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

Usually, when you go in to make a record, you have 30 songs, and you record 30 of them, and 12 of them make it to the record.

You have to stay in school. You have to. You have to go to college. You have to get your degree. Because that’s the one thing people can’t take away from you is your education. And it is worth the investment.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

My brother had written ‚Ocean Eyes,‘ and we recorded it, basing all of the production around contemporary and lyrical dance. I think of most songs that way – if you can’t dance to a song, it’s not a song.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn’t, so in the end they just released it themselves.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

Education is what you learn after you leave school.

A producer gets the whole vision done from top to bottom, to making the record to having the record delivered to the world. That’s a producer.

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

I’ve been composing music all my life and if I’d been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There’s a lot of places left to go.

I work with my brother Finneas, and he produces all of my music in his little bedroom in our house. We actually tried renting out a studio for a month when we were producing ‚Don’t Smile at Me,‘ but it was really hard there, and we ended up just doing it at home anyway.

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life?

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

We’re making the music that the people are asking us for.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.

When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

I want to produce the music to a movie that I’m working on, like what Prince did with ‚Purple Rain.‘

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

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

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

Looking back on the production of ‚Nevermind,‘ I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.

I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, ‚Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?‘ I was like, ‚I’d rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.‘ I always felt like an artist as well.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we, as a people, can be engaged in.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

I’m a studio rat.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

I’ve been in continuing education programs since taking my dance master’s exam at age 21.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.

Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‚Lights Please‘ happens like that.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

I put together amazing records, whether that’s finding the beat or putting the right hook on there, and picking the right artists on the record. That’s me being an A&R. And I’m making sure that they give me their best.