I’m not a person who defends myself very often. I kind of let my actions speak for me.

Start wide, expand further, and never look back.

If you try to protect yourself from pain, it becomes a stone in your heart. But the more you learn to face things, the more likely that stone can become a pearl.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I’m sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

I used to get into a lot of fights.

There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can ‚be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough‘ are not true. They are fairy tales.

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.

In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

I resigned from the Marine Corps and flying in 1974, even though I loved them both. I quit because I no longer wanted to fight for peace. Instead, I believe we can build a more sustainable peace by working for prosperity.

When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.

My moms always told me, ‚How long you gonna play the victim?‘ I can say I’m mad and I hate everything, but nothing really changes until I change myself.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

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.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

I’m no natural beauty. If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

The reward of suffering is experience.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

We cannot live being obsessed with what other people think about us. It’s impossible to live like that. Not even God managed to please the entire world.

My mother did not like children.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

It never mattered to me that people in school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it – though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, ‚I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.‘

I’m trying to keep a level head. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned.

I had a lot of resistance, and not just to fame. I was always conscious of not changing.

Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever’s going. Not against: with.

The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

It is a hard thing to let go of mistakes we’ve made and sins. God wants us to do that because He knows the guilt and the condemnation will keep us from becoming who He has created us to be.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.

If you choose to do something, attack it. You can hate me, but there’s one thing you can’t say about me – that I didn’t attack it.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

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

I never want to change so much that people can’t recognize me.

I don’t want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I’m completely confused. I’m like, ‚Didn’t you make that movie already?‘ I’ve been very fortunate, and I’m well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.