Old music is the same as new music - it's just a different way of delivering it.

The type of music I make, it's not just straight-up rapping. There's emotion in it. That's why people feel each song differently. I get all my vibes from rock music, you know? All my melodies and all that.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together. They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is a sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget.

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

I like Beyonce's music - some of it, not all of it.

To hear people saying, 'The music you are doing has really touched my life and it's moved me in a lot of ways. It's helped me get through some tough times.' That's the best compliment that you could get.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us.

Versification is, indeed, indispensable for music, but rhyme, solely for rhyming's sake, most pernicious.

When I have a creative insight, there is a high. I think back in the day, I made music as much as I did because it made me feel so good. I think you could argue that there is a creative addiction - but, you know, the healthy kind.

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Choreography is mentally draining, but there's a pleasure in getting into the studio with the dancers and the music.

I would love to be able to pursue music as a career but honestly, I'm just not good enough.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

For trance music to be good, it has to sneak up on you.

As long as it's good music. I love all music. It's got to be constructed properly.

All roads lead to 'American Pie.' 'As American as apple pie' was the saying. It was some kind of a big American song that I wanted to write, which would be a conclusion for my show and bring all the songs home, which it still does. I can go anywhere I want with American music and come home to that. And it all makes sense.

I want my music to be accessible to every listener because I know that I really have something to say in terms of really, you know, removing thorns from people, thorns that really makes us unaware that we are bleeding with these thorns, like pain, grief, jealousy and so on.

When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

If I hadn't had music in my life, it's quite possible I'd be dead and I'd much rather be alive.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.

Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Popularity gets up people's noses. But I understand the importance and the function of popular music. There is an artistic purpose. Popular music helps people to develop a curiosity and leads them towards classical music.

I grew up seeing my parents perform and sing, and I just always wanted to be singing, too. Music has always been my deepest passion and what I felt most connected to.

I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.

My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

Ooooh, I love Nashville! It seems like everywhere you walk, there's great music coming out of every wall.

Prince is gone. But the music will go on.

Like Jermaine was saying, it's a beautiful day, and we're just glad all of this is behind us. We can go on with our lives. And Michael can go on with his life and do what he does best, and that's making good music, making his fans happy, people happy all over the world.

Every musician tries to blend in some reggae. It's the only music that brings all people together, different races, different religions.

A studio is like a meditation room where music is created. And a live performance is the place where the creation of the studio is taken ahead. I love both.

I love clubbing - the abandon of it, the release of dancing, and being with my friends and the people I love. For me, it's never been about going out to meet guys or to show off my latest dress - it's the music.

Push-ups are seriously the best way to tone your arms - and they tone your abs at the same time! I like to do them when I'm home watching TV or listening to music.

I want to make hand-held music, undiminished by the need to make everybody in the world listen at once. The goal is to ride into the sunset, stereo blasting, and all of what's got you worried will disappear in the rear view mirror!

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.

You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.

Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life... That's a superpower I've been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions.