I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

Never get out of bed before noon.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I calculate that I took 20,000 punches, but I earned millions and kept a lot of it. I may talk slow, but my mind is OK.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

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.

There’s a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I’m affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Laughter heals all wounds, and that’s one thing that everybody shares. No matter what you’re going through, it makes you forget about your problems. I think the world should keep laughing.

The music we do is for people to enjoy, dance and sing to it. Dreamers – keep on dreaming and keep working hard to achieve your goals. There are many difficulties, but what matters is to stay focused and have perseverance.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

‚Wrecking Ball‘ is a great song.

I want to be relaxed in my personal life. I really don’t like to be hassled.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

I’m definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working – if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.

But, I’ve always loved John Mayer and I think T-Pain is brilliant.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it’s your thoughts that create these false beliefs. You can’t package stress, touch it, or see it. There are only people engaged in stressful thinking.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

I had slumps that lasted into the winter.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

We based the look on rock ‚n roll right from the beginning.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

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

I’ve been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what’s going on in their love lives.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.

Depression runs in my family on both sides, and I have to be wary.

The nicest thing for me is sleep, then at least I can dream.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

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.

Hatred is self-punishment.

Years ago, when I first started being a big star, I had fans that were fanatical. It was when ‚Jolene‘ was a big hit.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

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

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

An operatic voice is like no other.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

To all the musicians, to the Academy, with all due respect, reggaeton is part of our Latin culture. And its representing as much as any other genre at the worldwide level.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

‚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.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

If it’s good music, it’s good music.