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

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

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.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

That’s why I hate to get started in these jam sessions. I’m always the last one to leave.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we’re a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn’t being ironic.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

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

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

It’s what counts, isn’t it, on the Sunday, rather than pre-season testing. If you lock up, you do a little mistake, it’s nothing, but if you do it on Sunday, you lose a place or you have to box for a flat spot or something like that. It’s a much bigger problem.

I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

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.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

My whole life, I’ve sung and listened to music, and since the beginning, I’ve had iTunes and used Apple Music for streaming.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I hate letting my teammates down. I know I’m not going to make every shot. Sometimes I try to make the right play, and if it results in a loss, I feel awful. I don’t feel awful because I have to answer questions about it. I feel awful in that locker room because I could have done something more to help my teammates win.

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

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

I’m not actually a very keen performer. I like putting shows together. I like putting events together. In fact, everything I do is about the conceptualizing and realization of a piece of work, whether it’s the recording or the performance side.

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 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.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

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.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

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

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

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

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

I went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.

It’s terrifying to play your favorite band’s song in front of your favorite band.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

I am sure as everyone knows that I am not the happiest if I don’t do a good job in qualifying or the race.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘