Music is like film to me.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future!

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

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

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

‚House of Balloons‘ was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.

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

My music is a luxury.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Mick Fleetwood was one of my first interviews. And if you’ve ever talked to that dude, he’s the sweetest guy in the world – he’s just a trip.

I create stars.

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

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn’t have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that – except I couldn’t afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.

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.‘

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

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

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

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

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.

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

I never admire another’s fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

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.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

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.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

My music is influenced by L.A. culture.

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.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

‚Wrecking Ball‘ is a great song.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

If I heard someone else singing like me, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

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

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.