I’m a painter in sound.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

There is spontaneity to my work.

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

I know that the arts are important. I’m not denying that, but I can’t associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

I think ‚Hail to the Chief‘ has a nice ring to it.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

I say, ‚Yeah, Taylor Swift.‘ I think she is a smart, beautiful girl. I think she’s making all the right moves. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’s surrounded with wonderful people. Her songs are great. She keeps herself anchored. She knows who she is, and she’s living and standing by that.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

I just want to keep writing music.

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

If music be the food of love, play on.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

We based the look on rock ‚n roll right from the beginning.

I think it’s really cool when artists have song titles or album names that are a really conversational sentence.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

I was very camera shy. People like hot girls, so I put my music to hot girls and it just became a trend. The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

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.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

I made all my generals out of mud.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

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.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

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

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

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 record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

I never played with anything like toys.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

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

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

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 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.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

I’m the king of the anthems.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.