Until it’s on the radio or online, it’s not real. With U2, our album isn’t finished until it’s in the stores.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.

I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

I think country music is popular – has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.

I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I’m conscious of the mainstream without selling out.

I think I can keep a rhythm to a beat, but there are quite a few people who would argue with me.

Some of the kids in school used to call my father a fake or a phony. That kind of thing brought on a few fights.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

I’ve always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I’m a sucker for it, whether it’s Linkin Park or Little Richard.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

We can’t just choose to tell some facts and not others because we don’t want to upset people. We have to tell it like it is.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

I’m totally myself.

For a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.

It’s always great to perform at home in the good ol‘ U.S.A.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

A chorus is not easy.

You know, I just do whatever feels right to me! And so that’s what you’re gonna get!

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I just really want to get music out and tour and go places I’ve never been, and just do more videos. I love photography and videography, and so I really want to direct videos when I can.

I want people to understand they have to live their own lives the way they want to and not just do what we do.

My music is a luxury.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

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.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

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

I’m tough when I have to be, tender when I should be. When you find a really tough guy, he’s not a predator. He doesn’t have to prove himself. Guys who have to pretend to be tough, they ain’t. I’m tough.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

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

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

It’s like the Wild West, the Internet. There are no rules.

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

I am who I am and I say what I think. I’m not putting a face on for the record.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

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.

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

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

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

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.