It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

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.

I’m almost like three people. There’s me the, Dolly, the person. There’s me, the star. And then there’s me, the manager.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. ‚Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.‘ First of all, my girl is black: she’s Jamaican.

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

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

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.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Music is something no one can control.

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 know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

I’m a child of God first. Before I became a celebrity, I was baptized a Christian.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

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

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

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

I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

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.‘

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can’t replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

I just know that I’m a fan of all different kinds of genres. You’re supposed to be free doing music, and that’s how I feel.

Because I’m small, I’ve been called things from ‚Happy Feet‘ to ‚Little Face.‘

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

Rap was my drug.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

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

To all the musicians, to the Academy, with all due respect, reggaeton is part of our Latin culture. And its representing as much as any other genre at the worldwide level.

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

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

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

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

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.