There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

I stayed true to my dreams and, eventually, they came true.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

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’ve seen zero evidence of any nation on Earth other than Mexico even remotely having the slightest clue what Mexican food is about or even come close to reproducing it. It is perhaps the most misunderstood country and cuisine on Earth.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

Don’t ever forget two things I’m going to tell you. One, don’t believe everything that’s written about you. Two, don’t pick up too many checks.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

Anything I do, I want to do it well.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

Solitude is independence.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

When I was 50 years old, I actually decided to draw up a list of half a dozen things that I really hadn’t done very well, and I was going to make efforts to improve. One of them was skiing, and I really did become a very much better skier.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

You’re not going to scare me into being somebody I don’t want to be.

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.

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

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?

What you are comes to you.

Rather be dead than cool.

Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

I don’t believe in endorsing a product that you don’t want to endorse.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

There is one thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, and that is discipline. Because your dreams and your goals are not there waking up for you in the morning.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

With audacity one can undertake anything, but not do everything.

If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.

I’m all about evolution. I’m the first person to judge myself.

‚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.

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.

It is easy to get everything you want, provided you first learn to do without the things you cannot get.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

My pride fell with my fortunes.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.

If you start by promising what you don’t even have yet, you’ll lose your desire to work towards getting it.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.