Okay, a truly great song is a song that makes its own aesthetic intentions clear and then lives up to them and exceeds them in an interesting way. Alright?

Serious music isn't listened to in a casual setting. You don't want to listen to that in headphones on the subway.

Never try to do anything artistic when you're feeling something overwhelming. It's like driving a car: If you're experiencing road rage, pull over.

If you start out with a song sounding like Britney Spears, and you end up with a song sounding like Pauline Oliveros, you'd better have pretty good liner notes explaining what on earth you mean.

Well, there are certainly original things to say. But I'm not sure that a pop song is the appropriate format to say them in.

I think there is such a valid concept as "serious music," meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.

There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.

At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

I can imagine lyrics becoming better written by smart machines rather than stupid musicians. Songwriters generally have nothing to say. They may as well be replaced by machines.

My mother says I have boring percussion.

When you're making a singular pop song, you don't really need any subject matter. You just sort of say, "Uh, I love you." And then you try to figure out some rhyme for that, and there never is one.

Grace freely given by God,

Chess is not just a game. It is a way of life.

Now I realized that me and him were just alike. We were both born to win. And, when we were not winning, it was OK 'cause we were busy planning to win.

She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.

I think history has less of an impact on current times than the stories that we tell ourselves about that history [do].

I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.

If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force.

I grew up in Dubai, all my friends are there and I'm so used to it. It's such an over-the-top kind of place. It's really fun to perform there.

It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.

Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.