You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

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

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

However, there’s no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

I’ve always felt music is the only way to give an instantaneous moment the feel of slow motion. To romanticise it and glorify it and give it a soundtrack and a rhythm.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.

There’s always gonna be rock n‘ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n‘ roll records, and there will always be rock n‘ roll.

No press, no television. If my mom calls and says, ‚Did you hear about?‘ I don’t want to know nothing about anything that is going on in relation to music. I shut it all off.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‚Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in your community.‘

I’ve never wanted to use my age as a gimmick, as something that would get me ahead of other people. I’ve wanted the music to do that.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

I just know that I’m a fan of all different kinds of genres. You’re supposed to be free doing music, and that’s how I feel.

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

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 don’t just listen to rap.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

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

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

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

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

I’ve met some Evertonians in the street, and they’ve been friendly. I’ve had taxi drivers who have been Everton fans. They’ve been really nice.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

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.

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion.

We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

We all have to live together, so we might as well live together happily.

I used to make little movies when I was younger. I’d make my friends be in them and then edit them.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

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

Our brand of democracy is hard. But I can promise that a year from now, when I no longer hold this office, I’ll be right there with you as a citizen – inspired by those voices of fairness and vision, of grit and good humor and kindness that have helped America travel so far.

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.