I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

It’s always fun to talk about jazz.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

I practiced drawing all the time and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn’t getting anywhere – like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department – I would draw the other people.

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.

A chorus is not easy.

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.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

I think ‚Hail to the Chief‘ has a nice ring to it.

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

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

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

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

‚In Utero‘ was the first time I’d made an album that reached into the dark side. I remember the conflict and the uncertainty. I remember all those things when I hear ‚Pennyroyal Tea.‘

Homework’s hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, ‚Okay.‘ And then I sit down and they say, ‚It’s math.‘ ‚No! Not math! English, history, anything!‘

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

Some people are making music just for numbers and views.

I’d love to do a duet, always wanted to work with Madonna, but she never asked.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

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 didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia.

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.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. 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.

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.

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

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.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

I believe in singing.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

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.

Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer.

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.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

I can dance to just about anything.

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.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

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.