People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

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.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

I’d love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

I hate the idea of genres.

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

When ‚Paul’s Boutique‘ came out, I was one of the fans that didn’t get it.

I know the blessing of having a dad who played 16 years in the league. That experience, and seeing him as an example, let me know that it’s possible. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I love good, loud speakers.

I’m putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

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

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

Bob Dylan is like an alien on this earth, and I love him! I cried when I saw him play live because I was so close to him.

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

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

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.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

I don’t know which will go first – rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

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

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

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 think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

My mother is a singer, my sisters all sing, my uncles are incredible singers and guitar players, so it’s just kind of been like my habitat.

Kanye West is my favorite artist.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.

‚House of Balloons‘ was actually supposed to have more songs than it does.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

The Scoutmaster teaches boys to play the game by doing so himself.

Honestly, I’d love to be remembered as one of the best to ever pick up a mic, but if I’m doing my part to lessen some racial tension I feel good about what I’m doing.

Bhai was my hero and he had immense influence on me.

All of my music is honest.

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

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.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.