I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything – diseases, spiders… and people getting tired of me.

I’m addicted to placebos.

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

If you don’t feel safe as a child, you can’t learn.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

There is spontaneity to my work.

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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.

The story with anorexic girls – nobody works with anorexic girls. That has nothing to do with fashion.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

Hair is about when you’re younger. I am my hair.

Fashion is that thing that saved me from being sad.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

I calculate that I took 20,000 punches, but I earned millions and kept a lot of it. I may talk slow, but my mind is OK.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

All art is quite useless.

I think women want to take care of themselves, and I think having a voice in how that is done is very important.

As we dread any disease that undermines the health of the body, so should we deplore contention, which is a corroding canker of the spirit.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

To live is to think.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.