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.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

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

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

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

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.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

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.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

There’s always gonna be rock n‘ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n‘ roll records, and there will always be rock n‘ roll.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

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.‘

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.

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

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

I am in the fighting game. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics, I don’t care about other sports. I don’t care about anything I don’t need to care about. This is my sport: it is my life. I study it; I think about it all the time. Nothing else matters.

I don’t really focus on these things – on what tags are given to me or what people think of me off the field – stuff like that. My main focus is always to do well on the field for the Indian cricket team. When people say good things about me off the field, I am more than happy to accept them.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

The willingness and ability to live fully in the now eludes many people. While eating your appetizer, don’t be concerned with dessert.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

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

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like.

That thing about being an icon, the fifth Beatle, I just found it so freaky.

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.

My unpredictability is what separates me. If you move in so many ways, your opponent is not focused on what he’s doing. He’s focusing in on what you’re doing, and it freezes him. When they freeze and you hit, they shatter like glass.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

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

I always loved advertising. If I hadn’t been in fashion, I’d have been in advertising.

When you’re around me and really see that all I do is live and breathe for my work, it’s not strange, it’s just Gaga.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.