I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer. I’m a writer.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

I’ve been composing music all my life and if I’d been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

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.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‚Lights Please‘ happens like that.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

I signed up to be a musician, I want to perform, I want to sing.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.

The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

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’d been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it’s environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ‚ambient music.‘ But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

To not be modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked with have done their best work by far with me.

Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it’s a way to make a living.

I write music every day.

All I do is make music.

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

Mick Fleetwood was one of my first interviews. And if you’ve ever talked to that dude, he’s the sweetest guy in the world – he’s just a trip.

For me it’s always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

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.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that – of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

That little Miley Cyrus… she’s like a little Elvis. The kids love her because she’s Hannah Montana, but what people don’t realize about her is she is such a fantastic singer and songwriter. She writes songs like she’s 40 years old!

Even though I’m known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.

When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

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

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

I don’t really like to call myself a brand, and I don’t like to think of myself as a brand. I’m a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that’s not my focus.

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

Since I was old enough to understand what a songwriter/producer is, I’ve had a curiosity about how Max Martin creates what he creates. I wanted to see that happen. I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn from him.

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

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

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’m a singer, not a politician, and I think you don’t want the two to get confused. It’s not OK to be on CNN talking about people starving and then tell the interviewer that your new album is coming out in six months.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

It’s an endless proving of myself, that I really am a musician, that I have something to offer in the room. That women can be musicians, women can be rock stars, women can be more than an objectified idea of a pop star.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

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

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.