The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

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

You go to a festival, you know you’re not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I’ve made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

I love good, loud speakers.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I’m very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

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.

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

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

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.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Never regret what you don’t write.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

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?

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I’ve always loved Def Leppard, ever since I was little.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

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

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

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

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

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

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

I’m the king of the anthems.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.