There wasn't a lot of R&B cats doing songs at 120 beats per minute before 'Closer,' which I take full credit and responsibility for. That's all good, but it was an experiment. You experiment with something, if it goes good, cool, but you never forget where you come from and R&B is where I come from.

Everybody wants me to be the (guy) who's (sleeping with) every celebrity woman in the industry. Everybody wants me to be this (guy) in the club, popping 17 bottles just because. Everybody wants me to be Diddy, and that's not me.

For the first few years of my life my mom used to cut my hair so there were a lot of bowl-cut hair styles

If you want to be successful, you have to be the best person doing it. And in order to be the best person doing it, you have to get your work ethic right and keep going.

What I definitely learnt from Michael Jackson is that simple is almost always better. As a songwriter, as an artist period.

I named my album Year of the Gentleman. Just looking at how the essence of what it is to be a gentleman is very much lacking nowadays. Someone said to me that chivalry is dead, and I hated to have to agree, but it's true.

Prince is the ultimate performer. Prince is that dude that's going to get on stage by himself, if he need to, but hold you in the palm of his hand. Like, you can't take your eyes off the man when he's on stage, and he could just be sitting there playing his guitar.