As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

To be loved is very demoralizing.

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

People are underestimating the force of angry kids.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn’t just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

Love always ends differently and it always begins differently – especially with me.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.