I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

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.

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

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

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

I don’t just listen to rap.

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 like Cardi B!

I’ve always loved Def Leppard, ever since I was little.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!

My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.

I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

Music is in my DNA!

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

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

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

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.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

I’m an emotional person.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

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.