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

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

I’ve always done whatever I want and always been exactly who I am.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

If it’s good music, it’s good music.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

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.

I’m not trying to be sexy. It’s just my way of expressing myself when I move around.

Getting recognized is insane. It just blows my mind. Like, someone who you don’t know at all can just be like, ‚Oh my God – are you Billie?‘

My nails are my rhythm section when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.

I make pop culture.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

I’ve always felt music is the only way to give an instantaneous moment the feel of slow motion. To romanticise it and glorify it and give it a soundtrack and a rhythm.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

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

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know – not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that’s kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

I saw a picture of myself when I came out of the hospital. I didn’t recognize myself.

I wanted to write.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

It didn’t even occur to me that I’m the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses – the wheelchair gives me away.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

‚Wrecking Ball‘ is a great song.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

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

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

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

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.

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

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

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 stopped watching TV because of ‚The Wire.‘ Like, ‚The Wire‘ ruined everything for me because I don’t even want to watch anything else now.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

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.

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

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we’re a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn’t being ironic.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.