One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma. Them’s fightin‘ words.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

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

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.

I think ‚Hail to the Chief‘ has a nice ring to it.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

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

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

I give the children education.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

No, I can’t do rap music!

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

Most of us believe, or should believe, that every child can learn, given the opportunity, but try substitute teaching just once and you will see firsthand the socioeconomic issues that distract our kids from taking advantage of that opportunity.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

I always wanted to operate at the highest altitude, just in terms of hip-hop and the music.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

I love the song ‚I Hope You Dance‘ by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.

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 made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I’ve made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I’m proud of what I’ve done. In fact it’s been a good ride.

One of the skills I had to learn and become proficient in is kissing a man. I had never kissed a man. Will Smith did it in his movies, so did Jake Gyllenhaal, and I figured it was my time. So it was me and Steve Carell – fantastic.

What I do is I write mainly about very personal and rather lonely feelings, and I explore them in a different way each time. You know, what I do is not terribly intellectual. I’m a pop singer for Christ’s sake. As a person, I’m fairly uncomplicated.

It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

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

This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It’s all hip-hop. You can’t say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

I would fain grow old learning many things.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.