When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

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.

My family is very good about visiting me, and other friends as well.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.

I’ve always loved the fans in Scotland and have a little Scottish blood of my own.

I’m a big fan of songs like Joe Cocker’s ‚You Are So Beautiful‘ and Eric Clapton’s ‚Wonderful Tonight‘ – songs that go straight to the point.

My music is influenced by L.A. culture.

I’m so happy because today I found my friends – they’re in my head.

I wish all teenagers can filter through songs instead of turning to drugs and alcohol.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

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.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

A chorus is not easy.

I used to make little movies when I was younger. I’d make my friends be in them and then edit them.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love it.

I’ve always loved Def Leppard, ever since I was little.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

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.

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.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

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.

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.

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?

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

I went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.

I don’t know which will go first – rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

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.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

I got a job when I was 15 because my allowance was about $20 a week which in New York was impossible. So I used to waitress across the street from where I grew up.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

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

When you’re a pop star, it’s a little conservative; you always have to stay in a box. You have fans that are five and fans that are 65; there are so many people wanting so many things.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

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.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you’re allowed to fail.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

I hope the fans have enjoyed listening as much as I’ve enjoyed doing the games. I don’t ever go to the park where I don’t have a good day. I don’t like losing. But I don’t think I ever go to the park where I have a bad day. I don’t think once.

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.

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

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

Social media has given us this idea that we should all have a posse of friends when in reality, if we have one or two really good friends, we are lucky.

My music is a luxury.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

I’m no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.

On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.