I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

Because you have things like ‚American Idol‘ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

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.

A Khaled record is always the best.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

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.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

As for my stuff, I’m just doing guest verses for other people’s records. I try to stay recording, because if I don’t, I get rusty.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

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.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

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

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

If I’d had good discipline, I might have gone into music.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

I have so many playlists full of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

I love movement. I love moshing.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

Many of my fans often tell me that they listen to my songs to get through things. And therefore, obviously, I hope that they can picture being in a place where things are better… I hope my songs can bring people to a calm place.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

I own a ’66 Jaguar. That’s the guitar I polish, and baby – I refuse to let anyone touch it when I jump into the crowd.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

Rock ‚n‘ roll is ridiculous. It’s absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we’re wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

Music is something no one can control.

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.

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

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.