I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

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.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

My parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

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

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.

I don’t like to feel like I’m in a club when I’m in my car and I turn on the radio. Anything that ceases to be a song and just sounds like house music kind of stresses me out.

The joy and love that I get from playing football are unbelievable. It is such a feeling that I want to give everything that I have got. I just enjoy it, I am living a life that I never even dreamt of.

I love performing, you know, because, like I say, I’m a ham for this stuff.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

You will never fulfill your destiny doing work you despise.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

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

I was a smart kid, but I hated school.

I was a sociology major. And it had nothing to do necessarily with law, which is ultimately – I went to law school. But what I tried to do was choose something that I was passionate about or something that I cared about.

I sang a lot of low stuff on songs like ‚Secrets‘ and ‚Rockin‘,‘ almost like Toni Braxton. On ‚Secrets,‘ I’m a different person.

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.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

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

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Sure, I can get a little bit jealous. The good part about jealousy is that it comes from passion. It’s also the dangerous part and it’s an ugly emotion that hurts.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you’re allowed to fail.

So many girls come up and say to me, ‚I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m obsessed.‘ That’s the coolest compliment to me.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

When I put out ‚Video Games‘ in May 2011, it was a 5:25-minute love song; I was surprised when a lot of people said they were listening to it. I was surprised when it went to the radio, without me even knowing how something like that even happens!

I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

It’s always fun to talk about jazz.

I’m gonna be making records anyway, even if I had to sell ‚em out of the trunk of my car. I’m that kind of musician and singer.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Stand-up comedy is mine: it’s my entity; it’s my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

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.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.

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

Playing basketball all my life, I’ve collected a lot of different basketball shoes. It’s pretty much all I wear.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

I am in the fighting game. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics, I don’t care about other sports. I don’t care about anything I don’t need to care about. This is my sport: it is my life. I study it; I think about it all the time. Nothing else matters.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.