“You don't have to be a good singer any more if you can rap well.”
“You externalise extreme emotions, and you look at them objectively and understand them from a different standpoint.”
“My house is actually two houses that were deconstructed. They were Connecticut Valley houses built in 1771 and 1781. I took them down piece by piece and reconstructed them about 50 miles to the west on the New York/Connecticut border.”
“This illness made it impossible for me to give my best effort to our audience, but now that it's been identified, I'm looking forward to a complete, quick recovery and to get back out there with John as soon as possible.”
“When you're playing in front of people, everything is external. It's all going from you out to an audience. When you're in a studio, it's very internalised, it's going from the air through you into this meticulously crafted, layered piece of work.”
“For years and years, I was beset with snide remarks by certain members of the press, where they would turn John Oates into a joke, or they would trivialize what I do, which never really bothered me all that much.”
“I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I'm not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it's cool.”
“I think there are people who really always have and always will care about the quality of music in general, about the sound of the music, things like that.”
“I wanted to show the world, and myself too, what I can do. I came up in the world of Philadelphia soul, but I'm fluent in a lot of languages musically and I like working with different people from different generations.”
“I was just like a 21st century person waiting to be born, and this is the medium that I thrive in. And I feel stronger now than I did any time since I've been a teenager - I mean, musically, creatively.”