"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."

"If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated."

"In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive."

"The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen."

"People say to me, ''You were a roaring success. How did you do it?'' I go back to what my parents taught me. Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don't just stand there, make something happen."

"In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words; people, product and profits. Unless you've got a good team, you can't do much with the other two."

"The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything."

"The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do - they always reach."

"Management is nothing more than motivating other people."

"The ability to concentrate and to use your time well is everything"

"Motivation is everything. You can do the work of two people, but you can't be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people."

"The thing that lies at the foundation of positive change, the way I see it, is service to a fellow human being."

"People want economy and they will pay any price to get it."

"Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all those things effectively, you can't miss."

"Every business and every product has risks. You can't get around it."

"The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen."

"The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better."

"Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don't just stand there, make it happen."

"If you want to make good use of your time, you've got to know what's most important and then give it all you've got."

"I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy."

"I forgot to shake hands and be friendly. It was an important lesson about leadership."

"If a guy is over 25 percent jerk, he's in trouble. And Henry was 95 percent."

"In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else."

"We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."

"The trick is to make sure you don't die waiting for prosperity to come."

"One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt."