It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

In art the best is good enough.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

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

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma. Them’s fightin‘ words.

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 very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

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.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

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

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

I’m not going to make a song just to make a song. The day that I make an album, it’s so that people really know what Bad Bunny’s about.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band – or at least in a Pixies cover band.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

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.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

I don’t even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.

Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

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

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.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

I always say I wanna work with Alicia Keys. I’m in awe of her.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.