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

One of the things that was really an issue was I did not want to just be a woman secretary of state. I wanted to be a secretary of a state who was a woman, but not just chosen for that particular reason.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

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

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

Nature is our eldest mother; she will do no harm.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

I always wanted to operate at the highest altitude, just in terms of hip-hop and the music.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

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

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.

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

It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn’t mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

It’s always going to be a fight for anyone who isn’t an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn’t have a fight.

There is no scriptural basis for segregation.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

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.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

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

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer’s hand.

It’s very fun to be the hunter of the sounds. The hunter of the right energy. And it’s not really about if every sound is correct; it’s more the energy – if it hits you in some way, it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s not perfect. I’m still very excited while hunting for songs.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

I try not to go around looking like a hag.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

I wrote ‚Channel Orange‘ in two weeks. The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

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

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country – I know, because I am one of them.