My style influences my music and everything around me.

I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

I’ve been so blessed to play for the greatest coach at a time when our organization has done incredible things. I’ve played with the best teammates. Playing for Mr. Kraft and what his influence on the team has been.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

I wish all teenagers can filter through songs instead of turning to drugs and alcohol.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

More than anything, I like a jacket. You can do anything with a great jacket, the bigger the better. You can have any silhouette underneath. It gives you an attitude. It makes a gown look cool.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

All art is but imitation of nature.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

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.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

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

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

If I have something to say, I want it to be meaningful.

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.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

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.