This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It’s all hip-hop. You can’t say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

Music, for me, is vital. Punjabi, Bollywood, Sufi, RnB… I listen to it all. When I’m not listening to music, you will find me chatting with friends. Off the field, I just let my instincts take over. I certainly don’t think about batting, or which bowlers I’m going to face.

I don’t listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don’t have a car.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

I believe in singing.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs – that’s where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that’s very cool.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I’ve never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

I think ‚Hail to the Chief‘ has a nice ring to it.

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

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

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

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

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

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

I always felt like there was a certain standard of music that I had to do from the beginning, even when I didn’t have the recognition that I have now.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

I’m a painter in sound.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

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

I’ve made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I’ve made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I’m proud of what I’ve done. In fact it’s been a good ride.

Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I’d listen to Italian music.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that’s what makes them extraordinary.

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

My only scheme was to be a rapper.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

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

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

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

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

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

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

I’m an iPod person.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

My fans love me for me, my beats, my rhymes.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

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.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can’t replace the magic of four people in a room playing.