When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

From the beginning of my rap career, since I was seen and heard, I always had a store.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.

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.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.

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.

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

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?

If it’s good music, it’s good music.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

It’s a very strange thing being recognized or looked upon as someone special.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

All of my music is honest.

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.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

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

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.

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

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

I don’t think of Kurt as ‚Kurt Cobain from Nirvana‘. I think of him as ‚Kurt‘. It’s something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

The difference between humans and other mammals is that we know how to accessorize.

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

Music is something no one can control.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

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

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.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

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.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.