In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

I’ve always wanted to make a career in the arts, and I think that my only hope at doing that is to make it more about the work.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

I always wanted to do things right and represent myself as somebody that took the art serious and someone that took the business serious also, so I had time to weigh the options and figure it out and do my best to create the situation that was ideal.

Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

Love in its essence is spiritual fire.

I probably work harder, putting in a lot of time and effort, than a lot of drivers because all I think about, and all I do, is to do with racing, trying to make myself a better driver.

Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

In England, football is a big thing to talk about, but Liverpool, it’s a special place. You feel it when you make your first step.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.

An artist or a creative person of any kind goes about their work because it’s their path, it’s what excites them, it’s what aligns their soul with who they truly are, who they showed up to be.

My experience with power, you can maintain it, or you get it taken from you. You get you some newfound power and go crazy, and it get taken from you quick.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

Alternative R&B is in my soul. It’s not going anywhere.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

Our work is never over.

I have no idols. I admire work, dedication and competence.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

After getting out of the service and going into baseball I never wanted to do anything else.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Nobody likes to fail. I want to succeed in everything I do, which isn’t much. But the things that I’m really passionate about, if I fail at those, if I’m not successful, what do I have?

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

There is spontaneity to my work.

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

The way to know life is to love many things.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.