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.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

I don’t want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He’s a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

My brother Bob doesn’t want to be in government – he promised Dad he’d go straight.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love it.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

Real life is the life that’s in you, not your circumstances, like where you live or what job you have or who you’re in relationship with.

I’ve been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what’s going on in their love lives.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

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.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

We can’t just choose to tell some facts and not others because we don’t want to upset people. We have to tell it like it is.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

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

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

I tell my fellow reggaetoneros, keep giving it your all and bring more creativity.

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

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

I love to play. And fortunately, I don’t know a lot of musicians that suck. I know a bunch of really good ones, and they’re always up for playing.

I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn’t want to be a frontman. I just wanted to be back there and still be a rock and roll star at the same time.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.

I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic.

I make good music for long journeys.

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.

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that’s where a lot of preachers‘ kids get off base sometimes. Because they don’t see the same things at both places.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Some of the kids in school used to call my father a fake or a phony. That kind of thing brought on a few fights.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

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.

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

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

Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.

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.

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.

The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

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’m not going to say I’m cool, because I don’t really feel that. I just don’t care at all, and I guess that’s what people think is cool.

The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.

Every man should know, if you’re comfortable and you like it, you should do it. Everyone always worries about what the girls think, what the guys think. If you like it, do it.