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

When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn’t even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

Mariah and Whitney Houston were my goddesses growing up.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I want to keep making records as long as I can, but I don’t know how long you can be taken seriously in rap.

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‚Maria‘ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

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

They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus, that means guns, sex, lies, video tapes, but if I talk about God my record won’t get played Huh?

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

I must be cruel, only to be kind.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs – that’s where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that’s very cool.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

The one thing about the business of entertainment is that you have to learn patience.

I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don’t have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

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.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

You make ‚em, I amuse ‚em.

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.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

The effect of music on fashion has been immense, especially hip-hop and urban music.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

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

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

It didn’t even occur to me that I’m the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

My music is a luxury.

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 don’t like to be bored.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

Today, I’d like to talk to Bob Marley. I’d just like to ask him what was his method. Bob is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I don’t know if people understand how powerful his songs are and the simplicity and genius behind them, from ‚Redemption Song‘ to ‚Is This Love?‘ and ‚I Shot the Sheriff.‘

Wrestling is intimate. You can reach out and touch the wrestlers.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

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.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

I always wanted to operate at the highest altitude, just in terms of hip-hop and the music.

In Hawaii, some of the biggest radio stations are reggae. The local bands are heavily influenced by Bob Marley.

It’s always great to perform at home in the good ol‘ U.S.A.

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Life is a song to me.

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

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

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

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

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.