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.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn’t smooth. You’ll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don’t believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don’t give up.

I’ve always been an underdog. I feel like I beat the odds.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

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.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

I was 18 years old, and it was a dream come true for me to work out and eat great food for free. What else do you want in life? People think that is what it is like to be in a SEAL team, but it is less than a fraction of your career as a real SEAL.

I like surprises.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

You see, God helps only people who work hard. That principle is very clear.

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

The unyielding resistance of the Cuban patriots is symbolized by our 5 Heroes. They shall never back down! They shall never surrender!

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

Anytime someone tells me that I can’t do something, I want to do it more.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.

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?

The only film I’ve enjoyed starring a wrestler was Mickey Rourke in ‚The Wrestler.‘

In Hawaii, some of the biggest radio stations are reggae. The local bands are heavily influenced by Bob Marley.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

Everyone I look up to is bringing me into the tech world. You’d be surprised by all the music people in it, invested in it.

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

But for me to have the opportunity to stand in front of a bunch of executives and present myself, I had to hustle in my own way. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was that they didn’t get that. No joke – I’d leave meetings crying all the time.

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

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

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

Enjoyment is an incredible energizer to the human spirit.

Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‚artist‘ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

The more centuries that I am able to score, the happier I will be.

Get place and wealth, if possible with grace; if not, by any means get wealth and place.

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

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.

Some people plant in the spring and leave in the summer. If you’re signed up for a season, see it through. You don’t have to stay forever, but at least stay until you see it through.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

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 wrote ‚Channel Orange‘ in two weeks. The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

To all the musicians, to the Academy, with all due respect, reggaeton is part of our Latin culture. And its representing as much as any other genre at the worldwide level.

I’ve always strived to be successful, not famous.

I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.