To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,‘ he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. ‚Shake it off. Stop complainin‘. Stop grumblin‘. Stop cryin‘. We are going to press on. We have work to do.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

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.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

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

Music can change the world because it can change people.

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

My dad used to have an expression – ‚It is the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do, and thinks it still matters.‘

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

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

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

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.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

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?

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

I do have motivation. A lot of motivation.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

I like being a writer.

The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can’t afford to own it. So it isn’t really part of their life in the way that music can be.

Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

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

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

I remember being in Japan when Destiny’s Child put out ‚Independent Women,‘ and women there were saying how proud they were to have their own jobs, their own independent thinking, their own goals. It made me feel so good, and I realized that one of my responsibilities was to inspire women in a deeper way.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

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.

God wants to use you to make other people happy! And the happier you make others, the happier you will be because you reap what you sow.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

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

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

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I’m going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

For me, the essence of the great American Dream is spiritual. I believe that our Constitution is inspired and that it is based on principles that are timeless and universal. This is the reason why 95% of all written constitutions throughout the world are modeled after our Constitution.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.