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.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

I would love to get Rihanna on a Khaled song. That’s my friend, but every time I’m around her, I get shy.

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 feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

The vibe on ‚Starboy‘ comes from that hip-hop culture of braggadocio, from Wu-Tang and 50 Cent, the kind of music I listened to as a kid.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

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

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

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

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

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

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

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.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

How I love David Bowie.

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

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

I wish I could tell you me and my rock band were traveling around, strung out. No, we were a family band. Straight Partridge Family.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I’m conscious of the mainstream without selling out.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

I’ve been a huge fan of Chris Martin forever; it’d be awesome to work with him. He’s really kind, and he’s been really encouraging when we’ve met.

There’s something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that ‚Everlong‘ is on it, or ‚Best of You‘ is on it, and it’s really special.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

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

Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit ‚MIA.‘ That’s the best part of it.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

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

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.

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.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

I’m the king of the anthems.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

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

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

My fans love me for me, my beats, my rhymes.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

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.

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.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

Until it’s on the radio or online, it’s not real. With U2, our album isn’t finished until it’s in the stores.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

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.

Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.