It’s a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That’s where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer.

I’ve been a huge fan of Chris Martin forever; it’d be awesome to work with him. He’s really kind, and he’s been really encouraging when we’ve met.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

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.‘

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

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

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

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.

All of my music is honest.

‚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.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I’ve never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.

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

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

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

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

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

But, I’ve always loved John Mayer and I think T-Pain is brilliant.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

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

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

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.

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion.

You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

I think Mozart’s operas ‚The Marriage of Figaro‘ and ‚Don Giovanni‘ are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.

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.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

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.

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.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

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

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

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I don’t think anyone ever plans to change line-ups, but it’s something that comes with being in bands. I was in a band once and there were always problems – members come and go – and some of the world’s biggest bands have changed line-ups loads!

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.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

I wouldn’t call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I’ll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I’m listening to music and think, ‚Oh, there’s not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.‘

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.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

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.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.