You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

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

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

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

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

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.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

I play piano every day. I enjoy that.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

No, I can’t do rap music!

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. 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.

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.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

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

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Anybody that doesn’t like Cardi B a hater!

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

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.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba – ‚Lana Del Rey‘ reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

I create stars.

‚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.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.