“To me the most important thing is getting into a studio and making an album that is 12 or 14 amazing songs, getting up onstage, and making people happy by livening the rock.”

I think that if you’re passionate about something and you’re driven and you’re focused, then you can pretty much do anything that you want to do in life.

It’s funny, there aren’t too many musicians that also moonlight as studio engineers. There’s a few – the really brilliant ones.

Always have the highest bar for yourself.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can’t replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

Rock stars are like sports stars: If you snap your ankle, you’re done.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

If you play a Nickleback song backwards you’ll hear messages from the devil. Even worse, if you play it forwards you’ll hear Nickleback.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

We only do what feels right. If something feels forced or contrived, then we pull back. We remain the Foo Fighters.

From one generation to the next, The Beatles will remain the most important rock band of all time.

It’s not until recently that I could even imagine myself as an adult. But these kids today, they look at me like I’m Neil Young. Nirvana is the band their parents listen to.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

Wow, I get to wake up again? Ok. You have to make good with what you’ve got.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

My first album didn’t come out until I was 26.

Some people are attracted to vulnerability. From my very first album, I’ve been vulnerable. I’ve always given parts of me, parts of my life – good, bad, ugly. I’ve never put up this image as a super-thug. Also, some people just like the music.

The average rap life is two or three albums. You’re lucky to get to your second album in rap!

When I’m recording my album, I want to be acting, or when I’m on set, I want to be making music.

Nothing me and Kanye can do musically was gonna match the event of what we were trying to do. So we were trying to deliver an album and experience at one time; that was the idea for ‘Watch The Throne’.

When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.

My first album was mainly dealing with street issues, and it was ‘coded’: it was called ‘Reasonable Doubt.’ So the things I was talking about…

I don’t sit around with my friends and talk about money, ever. On a record, that’s different.