I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they’re transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

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.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

I make good music for long journeys.

I believe in a passion for inclusion.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn’t matter if you have a beautiful face or not.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

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.

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

We, we – as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

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

Genius, when young, is divine.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

Trap is new. It didn’t start yesterday, but when I was 5, it didn’t exist – not even in the U.S. I’ve evolved with the music.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

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.

And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

I need music. It’s like my heartbeat, so to speak. It keeps me going no matter what’s going on – bad games, press, whatever!

There is no such things as ‚best‘ in the world of individuals.

The fame isn’t important to me. It’s a blessing to have. Having so many people that support me, that love me and listen to my music, is beautiful.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

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

I don’t think I would be interested in the climate at all if I had been like everyone else.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

A Khaled record is always the best.