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.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

It’s a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That’s where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

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.

I don’t profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

I have so many playlists full of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

But, I’ve always loved John Mayer and I think T-Pain is brilliant.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

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.

I really like hip-hop and rap; that’s my main influence. I really wanna be more of a hip-hop artist.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

It’s not essential for me to have a big debut week; it’s not essential for me to have big radio records.

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

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

I’ve been around longer than most of my fans have been alive.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

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

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

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 have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

I guess that’s one of the things about growing up in the fifties – it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be at least as successful as your parents.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

I think I don’t take myself too seriously. You know as far as, it’s a fun life. I take my music serious, but I like to have fun.

Music is like film to me.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

I love movement. I love moshing.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love it.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

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

My style influences my music and everything around me.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

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.

I would love to get Rihanna on a Khaled song. That’s my friend, but every time I’m around her, I get shy.

I need music. It’s like my heartbeat, so to speak. It keeps me going no matter what’s going on – bad games, press, whatever!

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.

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.

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

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.

I’m happy that I have my family, and I’m happy that I had Virginia, where I grew up, to retreat to any time I felt overwhelmed. Whenever there were times when I felt like the rug was being pulled out from under me and I was floating in this crazy space, I would stop and go back to that neighborhood and realize nothing’s changed, really.

Music is in my DNA!

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

How I love David Bowie.