You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I don’t profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

I can dance to just about anything.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

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

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.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

It’s a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That’s where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

I write music every day.

I don’t just listen to rap.

Most of my songs have names of people I’ve met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

My fans love me for me, my beats, my rhymes.

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

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake’s important.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands. I had posters on my wall. I had Beatles records.

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

Music is like film to me.

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

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

When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn’t even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

I ain’t here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I’m just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that’s the way yall need Jesus.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

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’ve rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

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.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.