Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.

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

How I love David Bowie.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

First and foremost comes my family and my life with Brad. We have so much joy in raising our children and teaching them about the world that nothing really compares to that.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

The progress of India is the destiny of one-sixth of humanity. And it will also mean a world more confident of its prosperity and more secure about its future.

I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

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.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

Music is always a commentary on society.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

We came into a broken world. And we’re the cleanup crew.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

I listen to music all day every day. I can’t not listen to music. It’s kind of scary how much I listen to music, but it’s what I love, and it’s all I care about, so I’m good with it.

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba – ‚Lana Del Rey‘ reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

The hypothesis of matter’s being at first evenly spread through the heavens is, in my opinion, inconsistent with the hypothesis of innate gravity without a supernatural power to reconcile them, and therefore, it infers a deity.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

I live half the year on Necker, a tiny island in the Caribbean, and it’s always full of people in party mode. Everyone comes up to the big house, and we’ll be dancing until the early hours to the island’s band, the Front Line.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

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

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

I love good, loud speakers.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

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

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

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

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

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

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

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

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘