There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

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.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

Creative people don’t behave very well generally. If you’re looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you’re gonna be depressed real fast. I don’t have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She’s my first priority.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft – that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

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

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There’s no tricks. It’s honesty with big melodies.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Old is authentic. Old is genuine. Old is valuable.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

I love movement. I love moshing.

I think that it’s okay to be mad at someone who hurt you. This isn’t about, like, the pageantry of trying to seem like nothing affects you.

It’s very important for Christians to be honest with God, which often, you know, God is much more interested in who you are than who you want to be.

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.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

I’m a painter in sound.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

I do say things that I think will shock people. But I don’t do things to shock people. I’m not trying to be the next Tupac, but I don’t know how long I’m going to be on this planet. So while I’m here, I might as well make the most of it.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

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

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.