I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

I always say I wanna work with Alicia Keys. I’m in awe of her.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

Football changed my life and it gave me a platform to get out my aggression and it gave me a sense of value.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

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

I think if I keep working in the way that I am, from the heart and from passion and with love, well, the fruits of that will keep coming.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

When I came into this industry, I was never afraid to be myself.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

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.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

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

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.

I don’t just listen to rap.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

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

When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

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.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

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.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

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.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I don’t listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don’t have a car.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you’re wrinkled.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

I do have a few little tattoos, but they were mostly done to cover scars because I’m so fair.

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

It was always a plan that we were going to have a retail side with what were doing musically, like an Apple store or Nike Town. I wanted something where you can come get everything – ‚Marathon‘ or ‚All Money‘ or ‚Crenshaw‘ – and make it like an experience. Especially with what Crenshaw and Slauson meant to my story.

The purpose of a vacation is to have the time to rest. But many of us, even when we go on vacation, don’t know how to rest. We may even come back more tired than before we left.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

My only scheme was to be a rapper.

I was acting when I was playing baseball.

Think off-center.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.