I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

It’s not essential for me to have a big debut week; it’s not essential for me to have big radio records.

I make good music for long journeys.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.

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.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

Man, I’m the No. 1 living and breathing rock star. I am Axl Rose; I am Jim Morrison; I am Jimi Hendrix.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

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

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

I’d love to do a duet, always wanted to work with Madonna, but she never asked.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

In a long meter hymn, a singer – they call it ‚lays out a line.‘ And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can’t wedge a pin between it.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

Everyone I look up to is bringing me into the tech world. You’d be surprised by all the music people in it, invested in it.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

‚Nothin‘ on You‘ by B.o.B was the first song where I heard myself on the radio. I’d been trying my whole career to write a song like that, which incorporates live instruments with hip-hop and singing.

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

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.‘

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

No, I can’t do rap music!

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

In case you’re wondering whether I lip synch, the answer is no… people think so because I sound so good.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

I could imagine at a certain age, when I have no vocal cords left, that I would find a young man who could sing my parts for me. But I don’t see why I would stop.

All of my music is honest.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists – Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

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

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

I’d love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

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.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

‚In Utero‘ was the first time I’d made an album that reached into the dark side. I remember the conflict and the uncertainty. I remember all those things when I hear ‚Pennyroyal Tea.‘

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

I’ve definitely seen bands before they made money kind of change their thing on the next tour, and I prefer it when it’s a little more raw.

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

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 sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.