Music is like film to me.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

It’s important to love in hip hop.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

I can dance to just about anything.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

I was very camera shy. People like hot girls, so I put my music to hot girls and it just became a trend. The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me.

To all the musicians, to the Academy, with all due respect, reggaeton is part of our Latin culture. And its representing as much as any other genre at the worldwide level.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

‚Rocky‘ and ‚Rocky III‘ were the best.

A ‚scream‘ is always just that – a noise and not music.

When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine – it kinda sucks the life out of music.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

We have a Boesendorfer piano that I play every day. It keeps my brain and my fingers active.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

When I was performing the songs on ‚Kiss Land,‘ it was a great singalong. But there were moments where I realized some parts were catchier than the others. There’s maybe two choruses on all of ‚Kiss Land.‘

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

I really love the culture of hip-hop.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

I think I can keep a rhythm to a beat, but there are quite a few people who would argue with me.

Some people are making music just for numbers and views.

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

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

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

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

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.

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

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

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.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.