My music is influenced by L.A. culture.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

Who’s to say what’s a good voice and not a good voice?

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

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

Rap was my drug.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

I think if I did something in the pop world right now, it would be for Rihanna. I’d love to do something production wise for her.

I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.

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

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

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.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

Five or six songs leaked from the original version of ‚Encore.‘ So I had to go in and make new songs to replace them.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

I have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

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

I don’t know how the rap game is, because I’m a fan of reality, and the rap game’s entertainment.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

No press, no television. If my mom calls and says, ‚Did you hear about?‘ I don’t want to know nothing about anything that is going on in relation to music. I shut it all off.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

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.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

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

The Bible says that Christians are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. On the job, in the grocery store, even among unsaved friends and family members, God’s people are there to bring seasoning to an unsavory situation.

But there is a difference between cozying up to power and being close to power.

It’s not essential for me to have a big debut week; it’s not essential for me to have big radio records.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

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

I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that’s what makes them extraordinary.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

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.

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