It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

My production and songwriting and the environment around those vocals are not inspired by R&B at all.

I think I don’t take myself too seriously. You know as far as, it’s a fun life. I take my music serious, but I like to have fun.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

I just want to keep writing music.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

When I’m stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

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

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

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.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably… drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

Imagination decides everything.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

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

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

The Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.