If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

I will meet my countrymen. I understand only one language: that they are my countrymen, they are my brothers. You may see with whatever colour you want; Modi will not go into that colour.

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.

Never regret what you don’t write.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

I put cocoa butter all over my face and my iconic belly and my arms and legs. Why live rough? Live smooth.

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 technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

I know that a large part of my fan base is gay. They’ve shown me love from the start. I mean in this industry, everyone from my glam people to my dancers are gay. You can’t be homophobic in this line of work – I’m a pop star!

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

The day will come – and it is not far off – when the legacy of Lincoln will finally be fulfilled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when a black man or woman will sit in the Oval Office. When that day comes, the most remarkable thing about it will be how naturally it occurs.

I don’t just listen to rap.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

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.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

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.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Imagination rules the world.