Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn’t want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

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.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

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.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

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.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

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.

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

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors – old friends, family.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

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

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.

It’s always fun to talk about jazz.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

All of my music is honest.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

No press, no television. If my mom calls and says, ‚Did you hear about?‘ I don’t want to know nothing about anything that is going on in relation to music. I shut it all off.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

I’ve always felt music is the only way to give an instantaneous moment the feel of slow motion. To romanticise it and glorify it and give it a soundtrack and a rhythm.

The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

Prayer is simply a two-way conversation between you and God.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

I don’t just listen to rap.

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.