"In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs."

"I would love to do an electronic record. There's just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by."

"I sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back."

"I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out."

"I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years."

"I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me."

"I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem."

"Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way."

"Justice is the truth in action."

"When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it"

"Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features"

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you."

"Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman."

"Without duty, life is sort of boneless; it cannot hold itself together."

"The direction of the mind is more important than its progress."

"We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us."

"Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone."

"The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress."

"No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist."

"I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys."

"I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche."

"To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know."

"It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out."

"When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines."

"There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy."

"I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by."

"Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know."

"There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing."

"I didn't want to do something typical."

"Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude."

"Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out."

"Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind."

"Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else."

"I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose."

"What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It's not working. Something is going to have to give."

"If someone is making a judgment when they don't have firsthand experience, it's intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don't know about?"

"I had long hair when I was a teenager."

"I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere."

"I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible."

"I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record."

"As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate."

"When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything."

"Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars."

"I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense."

"Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way."

"I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself."

"Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year."

"I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music."

"When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered."

"There are certain songs that just stick around and do something that transcends whatever time they were written in. Through different eras, people are able to impart different meaning to the song, and they become part of some sort of consciousness."