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

I was approached about having my own network many, many years ago. There were some people who wanted to start up a network, and I didn’t want to get that involved in the business aspect of it.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

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.

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

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

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears.

In Hawaii, some of the biggest radio stations are reggae. The local bands are heavily influenced by Bob Marley.

In business, if you realize you’ve made a bad decision, you change it.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.

I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.

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.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.

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.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

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.

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.

‚House of Balloons‘ was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‚nirvana‘ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

A feeble body weakens the mind.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

I don’t know which will go first – rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

I love big business!

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.

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.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

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

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

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

I’m a painter in sound.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

I got an album concept called ‚Exit Strategy,‘ that might be one of my last ones. It’s a term they use in business when you build companies. You create an exit strategy as you make a company. You don’t wait till you’re five years in it; you create a exit strategy as you make the company.

Anybody that doesn’t like Cardi B a hater!

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.

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

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.