You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

My music is a luxury.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

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.

There is a ‚sanctity‘ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

Honestly, I’d love to be remembered as one of the best to ever pick up a mic, but if I’m doing my part to lessen some racial tension I feel good about what I’m doing.

It didn’t even occur to me that I’m the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

We were on for six years. We were in syndication for a while. It had its run. I still see the people from ‚Mr. Belvedere,‘ too. We stay in touch.

There’s been people who’ve rapped and produced – like Kanye – but I don’t feel like on the rapping side there’s ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

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

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.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

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

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

Life is wasted on the living.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

When I won the first Grammy, there was no other feeling like that feeling. It just made me feel like I came so far, like that was just a dream a few years before that, and then it was happening right then.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we’re continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we’ve taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

My life is my argument.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

I’d love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

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

I don’t listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don’t have a car.

The Congo was the most difficult shoot of my life but was also maybe the greatest adventure of my life.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?