I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we’re continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we’ve taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

California is not just the Golden State. We are also the Internet State.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

I don’t just listen to rap.

‚Wrecking Ball‘ is a great song.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

I would love to get Rihanna on a Khaled song. That’s my friend, but every time I’m around her, I get shy.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

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 pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I’m conscious of the mainstream without selling out.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

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

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft – that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that’s a problem that’s probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that’s actually within the range of affordability.

Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

For the chorus of ‚Secrets,‘ we used The Romantics‘ ‚Talking in Your Sleep‘ and ‚Pale Shelter‘ by Tears for Fears. It’s like hip-hop: just grab it.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

Five or six songs leaked from the original version of ‚Encore.‘ So I had to go in and make new songs to replace them.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

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

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we’re a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn’t being ironic.

A chorus is not easy.

Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I’d listen to Italian music.

I have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

One day, I’ll be listening to a bunch of Ray Charles, the next day it’s nothing but Red Hot Chili Peppers. The next day it might be Tupac all day.

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

I’m responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

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.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

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.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They’re my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He’s just really cool.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they’re stuck in that safe place.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‚Huh. It works. It makes sense.‘

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.