You are a valuable instrument in the orchestration of your own world, and the overall harmony of the universe. Always be in command of your music. Only you can control and shape its tone. If life throws you a few bad notes or vibrations, don't let them interrupt or alter your song.

The aim and final reason of all music should be none else but the glory of God and refreshing the soul. Where this is not observed there will be no music, but only a devilish hubbub.

See, music is about style.

If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist, it is because I want to laugh more. I don't say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That's why it doesn't matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.

It had never occured to me that thinking and music are so much alike. In fact, you can say music is another way of thinking or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life — not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.

..And songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.

Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.

The creative thought principle is very important, for as Gautama Buddha declared, “The mind is everything; what you think you become.

Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.

I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music

"So, if music is the best, what is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn't become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music.

Most people can't deal with that abstraction — or don't want to. They say: "Gimme the tune. Do I like this tune? Does it sound like another tune that I like? The more familiar it is, the better I like it. Hear those three notes there? Those are the three notes I can sing along with. I like those notes very, very much. Give me a beat. Not a fancy one. Give me a GOOD BEAT — something I can dance to. It has to go boom-bap, boom-boom-BAP. If it doesn't, I will hate it very, very much. Also, I want it right away — and then, write me some more songs like that — over and over and over again, because I'm really into music.