Drummers shouldn't just think of themselves as drummers. If you're going to be a musician, you should expand your horizons, compose things, and work with other instruments.

People are disappointed when they hear my American accent because they regard 'The Police' as an English band but I've clung to my American-ness all the way.

Making music has gotten easier; selling it has gotten harder. Making music has been democratized, but the market is in the hands of fascists.

Don't believe everything you see on VH1.

That whole thing of replicating what others do is a siren call. The sirens lure you to the rocks of unoriginality.

Music has an immediate effect. If you want to go beyond that and look underneath, film is a good way of explaining.

[If] you don't have any soul and you don't have any talent, jazz is what you should do. ... any fool can do it; all you gotta do is practice.

Ive got Arabic music in my blood.

In a film score, the last thing you want to do is take people out of the movie. The music is secondary. In opera, the music is the main event.

I'd rather duplicate it myself. Another of our favourite techniques.

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.

I learn my life lessons from time rather than lesser mortals.

Integrity is praised and then left out in the cold.

I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

We kind of have to rewrite our own stories and our own ways of being free.

This book, "Speaking Freely," starts when I came to New York. And the first chapter is about a man who became a friend of mine, much to our mutual surprise, Malcolm X.

The notion of anarchy ...means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions, then business transactions and exchange alone produce the social order.

Fame sweeps you away. I had to go home every six months to remember who I am.

This little member can behold the earth, and in a moment view things as high as heaven.

Peace can be a lens through which you see the world. Be it. Live it. Radiate it out. Peace is an inside job.