1. “Whenever I want to write a big song, I can’t…That’s when I get writer’s block: when I try to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. I’ve never gotten a song that way. But if I write about something the size of a glass of water—a week later, I notice it’s got the universe in it. So I’d rather have the universe in a glass of water than try to make a glass of water fit in the universe.”

  2. ”What connects with people is you connecting with yourself.”

  3. “Writer’s block is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. It is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.”

  4. “Don’t shoot ideas down before you have them. ‘That won’t work’ is the worst thing you can ever say. ‘That didn’t work’ is cool, but ‘that won’t work’ is not a way to go through life.”

  5. “I’ve seen the Cool metric change so many times. I’m not telling you don’t chase Cool. I’m saying…by the time you reach what you think is cool, Cool is like, ‘over here now.’ ‘The princess is in another castle.’ You know what I mean? That’s a Mario reference.”

  6. ”I’m one-half consumer, one-half artist. So I try to put music out that I myself would want to hear as somebody on the other end.”

  7. ”I’m seeing a lot of motivation about you following your passion, but I’m not seeing any critical thought to what that is or how to be better at that. So, really the product is passion and that’s strange to me. Because my product growing up was sitting in a room yelling, ‘Mom, I’m practicing,’ for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.

  8. ”But then also read up…You know, this stuff doesn’t just appear. It comes from somewhere. And as soon as you realize you love something—it’s almost like catching up with some great TV show on season 9, and you can go, ‘oh my God, that means there’s 8 seasons before this.”

  9. ”Whatever you learn is the tip of the iceberg. Dive underwater and find the rest of the iceberg.”

  10. ”So listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan brought me back to people like Kenny Burrell and Albert King and Jimi Hendrix and Elmore James. So it became this family tree growing out of my CD player.”

  11. ”I came up with these guys as like references…It’s like if you’re into the NBA and you wear different jerseys and you pretend you’re a different player in the driveway—that’s what I was doing…”

  12. ”Which is a wonderful technique for being yourself. Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself.”

  13. After watching Cory Wong play guitar, Mayer told him, ”You have an anatomy thing working on your right hand. Your hand is shaped in a way—you have long fingers, very sinewy hands—that you’re able to play like that. That is an example of someone making the most of their anatomical gifts… And I wish more people could embrace finding what their strengths are anatomically—the way your hand is shaped, the way your mind works, whatever—and play to those strengths.”

  14. Mayer picks up an acoustic guitar and demonstrates his songwriting process. “Well, I don’t always do it, because it requires a stupid bravery all the time. You just stare at the corner of the wall, stare at the corner of the wall, try to get it going on, but I can’t sometimes, you just keep going ’til you get something. You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it…it doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth].”