Kanye West

I don’t feel crazy any more! It was always like – it’s going to be one of two things, either i’m crazy or everybody else is.

I was afraid to show you this 300 acres that I just purchased that I’m building my first community on – my first five properties on – because I felt like it would be shut down.

A designer told me that my wife was a master of light and I was a master of time.

I believe ‘ye’ is the most commonly used word in the Bible, and in the Bible it means ‘you’.

[on Glastonbury] I started off the show and I completely messed up the music. And me, as you can imagine by this phone call, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So it really put me into a slightly depressed state.

I don’t have a sound bite for everything.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

I kinda went back to that period between ’88 and ’94 where I felt like I was the most creative, without being hindered by powers that be. I was no longer going to try to hinder myself to what I thought was going to be on the radio.

We never play anything the same way once.

It’s part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard – he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations – in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.

Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you’re not feeling right, play a minor tune and it falls into place.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t sit back and try to figure out what people want or leave it up to them to decide. When we all started in this business we would dictate to the audience what was great and they picked up on that based on the fact that we believed that it was great. But that’s all changed. What’s happened in the last ten years or so because is that the technology now means that everyone with a computer can make music and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.