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

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

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.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

Every story has its demands.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

I’m never on Twitter. I’m never on Instagram. And that’s not by choice: it’s just that those things never really interested me. I might post a picture here and there, but that ain’t really been my focus.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

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 put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

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.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

In case you’re wondering whether I lip synch, the answer is no… people think so because I sound so good.

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

My style influences my music and everything around me.

For victory in life, we’ve got to keep focused on the goal, and the goal is Heaven.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

However, there’s no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

The way I define ‚intelligent design‘ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.

I make good music for long journeys.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

I really love the culture of hip-hop.

I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

I feel connected to my generation through the music, but I also fear for us. We’re in a very self-destructive state where we’re addicted to outside opinions and we all feel like we have fans.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

The music we do is for people to enjoy, dance and sing to it. Dreamers – keep on dreaming and keep working hard to achieve your goals. There are many difficulties, but what matters is to stay focused and have perseverance.

I like Cardi B!

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

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

Whatever you want to do, do with full passion and work really hard towards it. Don’t look anywhere else. There will be a few distractions, but if you can be true to yourself, you will be successful for sure.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

I’m an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

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

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.