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

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

I think I don’t take myself too seriously. You know as far as, it’s a fun life. I take my music serious, but I like to have fun.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

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.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

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.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

I would love to get Rihanna on a Khaled song. That’s my friend, but every time I’m around her, I get shy.

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.

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

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

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

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.

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.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

The game is changing with songs like ‚Earned It‘ as opposed to it changing me.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

Mariah and Whitney Houston were my goddesses growing up.

I’ve been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what’s going on in their love lives.

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

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.

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

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.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

If music be the food of love, play on.

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.