I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

I love Chris Brown. He’s a superstar. He’s one of the best singers out there.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

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 sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

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

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

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 don’t think anyone ever plans to change line-ups, but it’s something that comes with being in bands. I was in a band once and there were always problems – members come and go – and some of the world’s biggest bands have changed line-ups loads!

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.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

I love the song ‚I Hope You Dance‘ by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

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

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.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

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.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

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.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

My music is a luxury.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

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

This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It’s all hip-hop. You can’t say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

I feel connected to my generation through the music, but I also fear for us. We’re in a very self-destructive state where we’re addicted to outside opinions and we all feel like we have fans.

I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

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.

Music is in my DNA!

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

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.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘