Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

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.

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

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

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.

There’s been people who’ve rapped and produced – like Kanye – but I don’t feel like on the rapping side there’s ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.

Music is really driving my whole life.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

If you can talk, you can write.

There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.

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.

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.

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

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

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 want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

I’ve never wanted to use my age as a gimmick, as something that would get me ahead of other people. I’ve wanted the music to do that.

I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

I make good music for long journeys.

Until it’s on the radio or online, it’s not real. With U2, our album isn’t finished until it’s in the stores.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

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.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

If you ever see young artists, and they’re not sounding good, they sound good. They’re good singers. They wouldn’t be where they are if they didn’t sound good. It’s their nerves. Any time you see your favorite artist, and he’s or she’s screwing up or not hitting those notes, it’s not because she can’t hit it or she can’t sing; he or she is scared.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

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

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.

Some people are making music just for numbers and views.

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.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

I think if I did something in the pop world right now, it would be for Rihanna. I’d love to do something production wise for her.

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

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

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

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

I hate the idea of genres.

I don’t think anyone ever plans to change line-ups, but it’s something that comes with being in bands. I was in a band once and there were always problems – members come and go – and some of the world’s biggest bands have changed line-ups loads!

I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Because you have things like ‚American Idol‘ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

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

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.