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.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

Tears are the silent language of grief.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

But I’m pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs – that’s where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that’s very cool.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought about somebody, picked up the phone to call them and they are on the line already, and I think that maybe there’s some vibration, some connection.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I’m just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way yall need Jesus.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it’s always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

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

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, ‚Fine,‘ but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, ‚What a horror!‘

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Dialogue means debates and everyone’s point of view.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

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

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.

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