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.

It’s pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

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

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

Kissing someone is pretty intimate, actually very intimate, and your heart always kind of skips a beat before you do that.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

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

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn’t even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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?

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

I think Mozart’s operas ‚The Marriage of Figaro‘ and ‚Don Giovanni‘ are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

I do think that we’re gonna move towards this world where eventually you’ll be able to capture a whole experience that you’re in and be able to send that to someone.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

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.

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

You can only have one aim per debate.

Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

It’s not possible to stop love.

The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.

No, I can’t do rap music!

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

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it’s employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.

Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.

People don’t realise how difficult it is to work with people day in and day out that know absolutely nothing.

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.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

It’s terrifying to play your favorite band’s song in front of your favorite band.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.