It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

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

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

Even if the economy crashes, we will still burn oil.

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.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

‚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 can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

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.

I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.

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

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

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.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

I love to play. And fortunately, I don’t know a lot of musicians that suck. I know a bunch of really good ones, and they’re always up for playing.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

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

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

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.

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Mariah and Whitney Houston were my goddesses growing up.

Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

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.

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.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

I adapt and I adjust to whatever environment I’m in.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

I just want to keep writing music.