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

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion.

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.

Not only do I think being nice and kind is easy but being kind, in my opinion, is important.

I don’t think of Kurt as ‚Kurt Cobain from Nirvana‘. I think of him as ‚Kurt‘. It’s something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

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.

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.

It is quality rather than quantity that matters.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

If I heard someone else singing like me, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

I’m a painter in sound.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

As for my stuff, I’m just doing guest verses for other people’s records. I try to stay recording, because if I don’t, I get rusty.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

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.

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

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.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

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.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

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

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

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

All Montreal bands have around nine members, I believe.

If you play an instrument, it makes you a better singer. The more you play, the better you sing, the more you sing, the better you play.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

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

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

We have a Boesendorfer piano that I play every day. It keeps my brain and my fingers active.

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.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

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

Rap was my drug.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

It’s very fun to be the hunter of the sounds. The hunter of the right energy. And it’s not really about if every sound is correct; it’s more the energy – if it hits you in some way, it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s not perfect. I’m still very excited while hunting for songs.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‚Maria‘ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.