I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I’ve stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

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.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. 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.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

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

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

Mariah and Whitney Houston were my goddesses growing up.

The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

I wish all teenagers can filter through songs instead of turning to drugs and alcohol.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

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

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

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

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.

When I heard ‚Jesus, Take the Wheel,‘ I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you’re a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

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.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

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

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.

Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

When I do listen to music, I’m more prone to listen to the people I’ve always listened to: George Jones, Otis Redding, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris.

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

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

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

I have a very eclectic iPod. So I’ve got my cardio people – so it’s anything from Beyonce to some Jay-Z to Janelle Monae, her song ‚Tightrope,‘ that’s a good cardio song. And then I’ve got Sting. I’ve got Mary J. Blige. I’ve got The Beatles. I’ve got Michael Jackson. I try to pick the songs that I personally love.

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.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

The song ‚Innocent‘ is a song that I wrote about something that really, really emotionally impacted me.