In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

I want to keep making records as long as I can, but I don’t know how long you can be taken seriously in rap.

I sang a lot of low stuff on songs like ‚Secrets‘ and ‚Rockin‘,‘ almost like Toni Braxton. On ‚Secrets,‘ I’m a different person.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

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!

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

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.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

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

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

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

I’ve made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I’ve made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I’m proud of what I’ve done. In fact it’s been a good ride.

My only scheme was to be a rapper.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

It is one thing to record an album but it’s a huge difference when people play it and listen to it and embrace it the way that I do. It has always been my dream to get my music out to the world and have people hear it.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

I cap myself when I shop; I don’t like to spend extravagant amounts on clothes. But, I do get lent clothes for events, it’s scary to wear something so expensive, but I feel really pampered.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

To be honest, I never really considered myself to be too much of an actress. So, whenever I get the chance to do music, I’m always, like, just in it. It’s like, ‚Oh my God, I finally get to do this. I’m so happy.‘

I always say I wanna work with Alicia Keys. I’m in awe of her.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they’re part of a family, not just a tour.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music – which I did want to be fun, and I did want it to be about individuality, but please also take away from it that there’s no dream that’s too big.

I listen to music all day every day. I can’t not listen to music. It’s kind of scary how much I listen to music, but it’s what I love, and it’s all I care about, so I’m good with it.

I don’t listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don’t have a car.

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 don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

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.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.