Diplo

“I think you can't really beat Bob Marley, especially the stuff he was doing with Lee Perry. Just that kind of clubby and dark and crazy stuff, even with the Wailers... Some of the songwriting was phenomenal.”

“When it comes down to helping kids, a lot of ways for education to move forward is through music because that's exciting to kids. Reading books and going to a bookstore is not that exciting.”

“K-pop is a weird term because K-pop has everything - rap records - it's very pop-sounding; there are really boy-band-sounding records.”

“I've probably got the most eclectic social media there is because it literally goes from hanging out with my son at a park, to, like, Madonna's house, to a rave in Africa.”

“I used to be a record collector. Mark Ronson, Questlove and I used to be part of, like, a record-trading crew.”

“Snapchat's the place where people are hearing and learning about culture.”

“The traditional media never gave Bernie Sanders the time of day. But he went viral the same way hip-hop and new dances go viral. And I'm part of that culture.”

“Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play 'Portrait of Tracy.' It's one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every great R&B song in five-year intervals.”

“Selling MP3s or physical copies, it's still cool, but I think it's slowly becoming outdated to where people just want to build a culture.”

“If I make a song, and it's my song, like 'Lean On,' we're going to make money off the synchs, the Spotify, and we get to headline festivals on it. That's the model I want to explore.”

“In Philly, there are a lot of social programs. If you have a degree, you can go and apply. I was basically a social worker, but I became sort of a sub teacher in a special program, helping kids with reading or math. But we would also do plays, learn about music... We were doing lots of fun stuff, but that was such hard work.”

“I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I can see things before other people do. I've always been able to do it.”

“You can never judge any music by their audience. That's the main reason people in England have a prejudice against someone like Skrillex. You judge people by their music. That's always been first and foremost.”

“New York feels like the whole city is into dance music. That's not how it felt when I was younger. There was more of a hipster scene.”

“I'm not a superstar, per se... but I'm a musical creator - a producer in the same vein as what Quincy Jones was, or Pharrell and Timbaland were.”

“Klaus from the Teddybears, Bloodshy and Avant and Mike Snow, they've done lots of Britney Spears production. They went backwards from production to being in a band, which might be cool. I might do that, too, one day.”

“That's what I care about is the people I work with and representing them and helping to make their music apparent for the rest of the world.”

“A lot of producers get famous because they decide to be superstars for their own reasons, but I'm inspired by Timbaland and Pharrell and Swizz Beatz 'cause they're doing things that are so different. I like how they're introducing ideas I never would have thought of.”

“You just have to do; you can't live by the rules of what you're supposed to do. I think every person is good at something, and you just have to push that forward.”

“90 percent of the records I make are spontaneous.”