“If you are not going to produce albums then you are not going to produce new fans. It’s impossible.”

There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.

If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.

The things like that we could fight about, we really don’t. We are pretty lucky for that.

I just try and learn to be a good husband and be a good father before I am a good rock star. That means saying no to certain things that go with the business.

Touring hard and then working on putting the next one out. I don’t need to break. I just need to put a record out.

English bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots.

While making art you should just do what is in your heart.

Well madam, have you looked in the mirror and seen the state of your nose? Boxing is my excuse. What’s yours?

One of the most heinous, insidious lies is the notion that you have to be an asshole to be a successful business person.

If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table.

Computers no longer interface with humans–they interact, and the interaction will become steadily deeper, more subtle, and more crucial to our collective sanity and ultimate survival.

Past dreams of bliss our lives contain, And slight the chords that still retain A heart estranged to joys again,

Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair.

In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won’t dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.

You Don’t Have to Go Home from Work Exhausted!

You can get spiritual things out of books and stories and they have nothing to do with religion.

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.

You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like ‘I still go to the projects.’ I’m like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it’s so cool?

MTV made a huge impact. Heavy rotation took you from selling 1m albums to 20m albums, and that meant a lot of dough.

We’ve made bad albums in the past, and people have bought them. I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m just grateful for it.

I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.