My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

I’ve never wanted to use my age as a gimmick, as something that would get me ahead of other people. I’ve wanted the music to do that.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

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?

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

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

Love… it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

When I heard ‚Jesus, Take the Wheel,‘ I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you’re a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I’ve never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line’s always been really blurred for me. I’ll hang out with them after the show. I’ll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I’ll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes.

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.

I want get across to not just the church world. I want to get outside those walls to everyday people.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I’m just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way yall need Jesus.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

I want to thank my Eritrean fans for feeling connected to me and for supporting me. I feel extremely grateful.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

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

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

You can stroke people with words.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

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

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

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.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

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

All Montreal bands have around nine members, I believe.

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

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

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

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

I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

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.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

How I love David Bowie.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

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.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

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.