I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

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.

Life is a song to me.

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.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

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.

In Puerto Rico we dance to everything.

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.

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 never wanted to perform and never proclaimed myself to be a performer.

Today, I’d like to talk to Bob Marley. I’d just like to ask him what was his method. Bob is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I don’t know if people understand how powerful his songs are and the simplicity and genius behind them, from ‚Redemption Song‘ to ‚Is This Love?‘ and ‚I Shot the Sheriff.‘

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

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

My only scheme was to be a rapper.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.

I love eating chocolate cake and ice cream after a show. I almost justify it in my mind as, ‚You were a good boy onstage and you did your show, so now you can have some cake and ice cream.‘

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

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

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

I can dance to just about anything.

The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.

I’m putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

I never listen to ‚Nevermind.‘ I haven’t listened to it since we put it out. That says something.

It’s very intense to be in front of a live audience. It’s just an amazing experience. It’s dangerous. Everything out there is heightened. The bad stuff is extra-worse. The silences are extra-silent. The good stuff is amazing. It’s electric when you walk out there. For 90 minutes, you’re on this other planet.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

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.

A ‚scream‘ is always just that – a noise and not music.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists – Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

Endorsements are a reward for good performance on the field, and the commitments made after signing them need to be done.

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.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

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

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

My success rate speaks for itself.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.