"Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man."

"It is an aspect of all happiness to suppose that we deserve it"

"Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them."

"The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing."

"I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for."

"I love British humor. It's just so - surreal."

"You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record."

"We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one."

"There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it."

"There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released."

"The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things."

"The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have - a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is."

"Sea Change was so specific. From the beginning it was set what it was going to be. All the other ideas that I had at the time I had to put to the side."

"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debate."

"Chance generally favors the prudent."

"There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world."

"Never cut what you can untie."

"Children need models more than they need critics"

"Children need models rather than critics."

"Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings."

"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it."

"The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk."

"Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself."

"In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments."

"In the past it seemed like I was making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I'm not technically a rapper, whatever that means."

"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."