Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.

I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you have or don’t have, what you lack, or what you have too much of. But all you need to have is faith in God, an undying passion for what you do and what you choose to do in this life, and a relentless drive and the will to do whatever it takes to be successful in whatever you put your mind to.

I always try to do as much as I can do. I’m never a person that does not enough, because I’d regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and other things it doesn’t work.

Michael Jordan changed so much in basketball, he took his power to make a difference. It’s so much going on in music right now and somebody has to make a difference.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

There’s been a lot of talk about Jack White wanting to work with me, and I’ve always admired him, and of course, he lives in Nashville, too.

Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.

Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

I should be a postage stamp, because that’s the only way I’ll ever get licked. I’m beautiful. I’m fast. I’m so mean I make medicine sick. I can’t possibly be beat.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.

I’m a writer first and a singer second.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that’s fine. But even if you don’t quote-unquote make it, you’re fine if you’ve given it your whole heart and soul.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, ‚How did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined?‘

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

Failure is not an option. Everyone has to succeed.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

It’s a rule to give all, and it can make the difference if you work more. If you don’t have to give all, and you still win, what’s this?

I think that promoting insecurity in the form of plastic surgery is infinitely more harmful than an artistic expression related to body modification.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I’d say probably in the early ’70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, ‚cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.

I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family… Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

I like to be creative.

I always feel like it’s two key ingredients when it comes to following your dreams, making something happen that the average person deems difficult. If you truly believe it, that’s step one. Step two, is, you know, the hard work that goes along with it.

Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.

I’ve heard there are troubles of more than one kind; some come from ahead, and some come from behind. But I’ve brought a big bat. I’m all ready, you see; now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.