My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

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.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

From the beginning of my rap career, since I was seen and heard, I always had a store.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

‚In Utero‘ was the first time I’d made an album that reached into the dark side. I remember the conflict and the uncertainty. I remember all those things when I hear ‚Pennyroyal Tea.‘

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

I was arrested for lip-syncing karaoke.

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

Hawaiian music is beautiful and simple.

Honestly, I’d love to be remembered as one of the best to ever pick up a mic, but if I’m doing my part to lessen some racial tension I feel good about what I’m doing.

I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever.

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

All Montreal bands have around nine members, I believe.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

Chicago gave me more music than any other city in America.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

I don’t profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

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.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

It’s always great to perform at home in the good ol‘ U.S.A.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

‚Nothin‘ on You‘ by B.o.B was the first song where I heard myself on the radio. I’d been trying my whole career to write a song like that, which incorporates live instruments with hip-hop and singing.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they’re stuck in that safe place.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play.

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.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

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

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

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

Man, I’m the No. 1 living and breathing rock star. I am Axl Rose; I am Jim Morrison; I am Jimi Hendrix.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. 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.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

I’ve always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I’m a sucker for it, whether it’s Linkin Park or Little Richard.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

Once you’ve changed who you are or who you’ve portrayed in your music, the fans, they’ll catch it… Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

The real lover is the man who can thrill you just by touching your head or smiling into your eyes – or just by staring into space.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

I don’t just listen to rap.