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

It’s not essential for me to have a big debut week; it’s not essential for me to have big radio records.

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

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

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

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‚Huh. It works. It makes sense.‘

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.

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.

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 know that a large part of my fan base is gay. They’ve shown me love from the start. I mean in this industry, everyone from my glam people to my dancers are gay. You can’t be homophobic in this line of work – I’m a pop star!

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music – which I did want to be fun, and I did want it to be about individuality, but please also take away from it that there’s no dream that’s too big.

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?

The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.

I’m the king of the anthems.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

I have so many playlists full of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

I am a beneficiary of the American people’s generosity, and I hope we can have comprehensive immigration legislation that allows this country to continue to be enriched by those who were not born here.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

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

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I make good music for long journeys.

We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful.

I’d like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!

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.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

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 think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

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.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

I own a ’66 Jaguar. That’s the guitar I polish, and baby – I refuse to let anyone touch it when I jump into the crowd.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

A Khaled record is always the best.

No one has been barred on account of his race from fighting or dying for America, there are no white or colored signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

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 feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

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

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.