Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.

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.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

Life is a song to me.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.

My doorman is more important to me than any head of any company. He keeps us safe.

When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

I wouldn’t call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I’ll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I’m listening to music and think, ‚Oh, there’s not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.‘

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

2018 is an incredibly important election year, not just with the important midterms here in the U.S., but you just had the Mexican elections. You have Brazil. You have India coming up at the beginning of next year. There’s an assortment of elections around the EU. We’re very serious about this. We know that we need to get this right.

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.

I make good music for long journeys.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I’m putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.

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.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

Kanye West is my favorite artist.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

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.

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.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

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

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Winning – that’s the most important to me. It’s as simple as that.

Hawaiian music is beautiful and simple.

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

I think hygiene is so important.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

Music is something no one can control.

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.

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.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole.

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.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

I listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘

Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I’ve never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line’s always been really blurred for me. I’ll hang out with them after the show. I’ll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I’ll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes.

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.