In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.

I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

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

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

I always felt like there was a certain standard of music that I had to do from the beginning, even when I didn’t have the recognition that I have now.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

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

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

It’s terrifying to play your favorite band’s song in front of your favorite band.

Everything has changed, and nothing has changed more than the world of fashion.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

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.

Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn’t work today.

My favorite record label of all time is Motown. That era of music was my favorite.

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 intend to stop making music.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it’d take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn’t want to retreat.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

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.

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.

I went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.

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.

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.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

There’s been people who’ve rapped and produced – like Kanye – but I don’t feel like on the rapping side there’s ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.

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 grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

I know people said I wasn’t selling out in America, but that was entirely untrue. We sold out all over the world, and every night I looked out into the fans and those front rows that you’re talking about, the tears, the honesty, the inability to not be completely overjoyed because they felt accepted.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.