I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

I don’t believe you could be a 39-year-old quarterback in the NFL and eat cheeseburgers every day. I want to be able to do what I love to do for a long time.

My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.

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

I treated it like every day was my last day with a basketball.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

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.

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

The age in which we live, this non-stop distraction, is making it more impossible for the young generation to ever have the curiosity or discipline… because you need to be alone to find out anything.

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.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

Although I’ve been living in the British Virgin Islands for some time now, I have never stopped caring passionately about the U.K. and its great people.

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

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

I was always interested – I mean, it’s kind of part of your job – I was always interested in the camera.

You know, God gave me a gift to do other things besides play the game of basketball.

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword – two jackets, one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

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.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That’s what’s big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.

Five or six songs leaked from the original version of ‚Encore.‘ So I had to go in and make new songs to replace them.

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 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.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

All of my brothers and sisters are very talented. They all sang all right.

There is nothing I love as much as a good fight.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

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.

Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.

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.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say ‚recognize‘ because you’re not… it’s not new.

You know, I’m just 6’9 and 260. And just so happen to be very good at playing the game of basketball.“

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

Somewhere deep down there’s a decent man in me, he just can’t be found.