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

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

It’s very fun to be the hunter of the sounds. The hunter of the right energy. And it’s not really about if every sound is correct; it’s more the energy – if it hits you in some way, it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s not perfect. I’m still very excited while hunting for songs.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

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

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

I don’t think of Kurt as ‚Kurt Cobain from Nirvana‘. I think of him as ‚Kurt‘. It’s something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

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

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn’t want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

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.

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.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.

There’s always gonna be rock n‘ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n‘ roll records, and there will always be rock n‘ roll.

Who’s to say what’s a good voice and not a good voice?

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

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It’s what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.

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

Philosophy is the highest music.

I’m a serious aficionada of country music – Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I’ve even written some songs. They haven’t done anything of mine yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

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.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

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.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

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.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

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 doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

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

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

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

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.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

You get to a point where it’s like you can’t really do anything right, and people will pick on you for whatever decisions you make, so I just try and take no notice and get on with my music.

A good song never gets old.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

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.‘

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

I go to Wal-Mart all the time. The one in my hometown of Hendersonville, Tenn., is open 24 hours, so I go there a lot to buy DVDs and stuff like that.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

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

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.