I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

It’s important for me to let my fans know I really don’t care. I’m confident.

It’s always fun to talk about jazz.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

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

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma. Them’s fightin‘ words.

I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.

There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

Music, for me, is vital. Punjabi, Bollywood, Sufi, RnB… I listen to it all. When I’m not listening to music, you will find me chatting with friends. Off the field, I just let my instincts take over. I certainly don’t think about batting, or which bowlers I’m going to face.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

We’re all insecure, aren’t we? I’m not walking around like I’m macho man or anything.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

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

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

I only act from my heart.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

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.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

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

We have a Boesendorfer piano that I play every day. It keeps my brain and my fingers active.

So many girls come up and say to me, ‚I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m obsessed.‘ That’s the coolest compliment to me.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it’s to be true and not cover up the cracks.

I’ve always done whatever I want and always been exactly who I am.

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.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

I’m tough when I have to be, tender when I should be. When you find a really tough guy, he’s not a predator. He doesn’t have to prove himself. Guys who have to pretend to be tough, they ain’t. I’m tough.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

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.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

Music is always a commentary on society.

I listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

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.

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

Old is authentic. Old is genuine. Old is valuable.

Music is part of the life of fashion, too.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.