You can’t really imagine music without technology.

The Internet is a big distraction.

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

When ‚Paul’s Boutique‘ came out, I was one of the fans that didn’t get it.

I think there will be PCs at every price point.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

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

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.

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.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

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

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

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

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‚Maria‘ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

I love good, loud speakers.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

I’m not a futurist.

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.

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

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

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

Connectivity just can’t be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation, and that’s why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‚nirvana‘ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‚Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.‘

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

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.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.

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

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Although designers continue to dream of ‚transparency‘ – technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt – both creators and audiences actually like technologies with ‚personality.‘