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.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

I listen to music all day every day. I can’t not listen to music. It’s kind of scary how much I listen to music, but it’s what I love, and it’s all I care about, so I’m good with it.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn’t say I lived in a ghetto; I’d say I lived in the ‚hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now.

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

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

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.

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

One of the things that was really an issue was I did not want to just be a woman secretary of state. I wanted to be a secretary of a state who was a woman, but not just chosen for that particular reason.

I owe nothing to Women’s Lib.

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.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‚dark continent‘, and because I was a girl.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

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

Latin music is universal.

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine – it kinda sucks the life out of music.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

I don’t want enemies. I want friends, and I want them in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and loving whoever they want to.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

It’s always fun to talk about jazz.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

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’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

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

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

All I can say is I am sensitive to discrimination on any basis because I have experienced that upset.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

We’re a diverse society, and I think the TV is doing a great job in showing that we’re all human beings, that we can all get along, that we can all be together, and I think that’s a marvelous thing.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

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 still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

The battle for women’s rights has been largely won.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

We must make it clear that a platform of ‚I hate gay men and women‘ is not a way to become president of the United States.

Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I’ve never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line’s always been really blurred for me. I’ll hang out with them after the show. I’ll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I’ll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes.

I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn’t want to be a frontman. I just wanted to be back there and still be a rock and roll star at the same time.