These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‚if‘ we will fall, but ‚when.‘ There are no exceptions.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

People like to blame others. I think a person should just look at their own situation, look around them, find out what they wish to do, and seek and go and do that. And that’s it.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

I love stories about women.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

It’s like a jar of salad dressing sitting on a shelf… most of the seasoning settles to the bottom of the bottle. But when you shake that bottle up, all the ingredients mix together and then the dressing can add flavor to a salad. In the same way, we can stir ourselves up and regain the reverence, respect and awe we once had for the Lord.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

The people in my songs are all me.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

Did you know there’s a difference between being busy and being fruitful? Did you ever stop to think that just being busy – running around in circles all day but not accomplishing anything – is the same as wasting your time? It’s frustrating to expend so much energy and time and not have any fruit from your effort!

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

I wrote a song with Ed Sheeran that was kind of spontaneous.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

‚House of Balloons‘ was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

I realized, ‚Yo, I can’t do anything in moderation. I don’t know how.‘

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

I disagree with everything I used to say.

I let the American people down.

All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

I’m not a bad person.

I don’t think anything about a personal legacy. I mean, those words would never come out of my mouth unless I just repeated them. Those things have never been important to me.

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

I can never say ‚why‘ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‚how‘ and ‚when‘ and ‚what.‘ But ‚why‘ is impenetrable to me.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.