Music for me, it demands full concentration.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

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

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.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

Steve Jobs‘ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

I’ve always felt music is the only way to give an instantaneous moment the feel of slow motion. To romanticise it and glorify it and give it a soundtrack and a rhythm.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

The vibe on ‚Starboy‘ comes from that hip-hop culture of braggadocio, from Wu-Tang and 50 Cent, the kind of music I listened to as a kid.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

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

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

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

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?

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

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

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

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

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

Bob Dylan is like an alien on this earth, and I love him! I cried when I saw him play live because I was so close to him.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

I don’t even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

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

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.

Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

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

I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

If you ever see young artists, and they’re not sounding good, they sound good. They’re good singers. They wouldn’t be where they are if they didn’t sound good. It’s their nerves. Any time you see your favorite artist, and he’s or she’s screwing up or not hitting those notes, it’s not because she can’t hit it or she can’t sing; he or she is scared.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

What I like about pop music, and why I’m still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music.

Man, that record came out and was real big in Memphis. They started playing it, and it got real big. Don’t know why-the lyrics had no meaning.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

A chorus is not easy.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

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

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

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.

Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.

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 could imagine at a certain age, when I have no vocal cords left, that I would find a young man who could sing my parts for me. But I don’t see why I would stop.

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

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‚Well gee, let’s not mess this up.‘ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.