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

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I’ve never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I’ve never been interested in that.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Jesters do often prove prophets.

WWE is a space where I thrived, and I loved, and I still do. I love connecting with an audience; that is the greatest thing about going back to WWE.

The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.

Hawaiian music is beautiful and simple.

I never listen to ‚Nevermind.‘ I haven’t listened to it since we put it out. That says something.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

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’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.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

For the chorus of ‚Secrets,‘ we used The Romantics‘ ‚Talking in Your Sleep‘ and ‚Pale Shelter‘ by Tears for Fears. It’s like hip-hop: just grab it.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

I love Chris Brown. He’s a superstar. He’s one of the best singers out there.

I always say I wanna work with Alicia Keys. I’m in awe of her.

The great moments of rock ‚n‘ roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

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

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

Everyone I look up to is bringing me into the tech world. You’d be surprised by all the music people in it, invested in 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.

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.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

Everybody loved ‚The A-Team‘ because it was entertainment, pure and simple.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

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

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

As for my stuff, I’m just doing guest verses for other people’s records. I try to stay recording, because if I don’t, I get rusty.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

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

Much of everyday life is filled with opportunities to be distracted. Our possessions… entertainment… cares and anxieties… and even the passionate desire and pursuit of things, some good and not so good, can keep our minds and hearts caught up in a flurry of activity.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

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

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

I wrote ‚Channel Orange‘ in two weeks. The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

I’ve been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what’s going on in their love lives.

I’m all about surprises. If you watch a horror movie, and it’s called ‚Kiss Land,‘ it’s probably going to be the most terrifying thing you’ve ever seen in your life.