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

A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.

I’ll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, ooh, here it comes. They do a lot of things. They talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it’s disappointing.

Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.

Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.

The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

The details surrounding both my marriage and subsequent filing for divorce are private, and I had hoped to keep them that way for the sake of my family.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I used to carry my father’s Bible and put it on the pulpit so he could preach.

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort.

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

Every man’s reputation proceeds from those of his own household.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

No, we don’t own our children. Our parental privilege is to love them, to lead them, and to let them go.

My wife and I love each other very much.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

God is so big. It’s a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we’re small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

I’m a serious aficionada of country music – Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I’ve even written some songs. They haven’t done anything of mine yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

I like actors very much, but to marry one would be like marrying your brother. You look too much alike in the mirror.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

At the end of the day, we started playing football because we loved it.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

I love the attention but I don’t like too much of it.

I can’t stress to you enough how much I can relate to teens being cyberbullied. Something that helps me is looking at old videos of me and my friends from middle school, or videos of my family. I love watching funny videos of my favorite people – it really cheers me up.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

We are not actually equal – humanity – if we are not allowed to freely love one another.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

My son has died of AIDS.

I never thought I’d have children; I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person. Having come from a broken home – you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.

What good am I? I can’t have kids. I can’t cook. I’ve been divorced three times. Who would want me?

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

When I was growing up, I wanted to adopt, because I was aware there were kids that didn’t have parents.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

I think everyone should be with who they love.

I was fortunate and I was lucky that I had a couple of people in my life who cared about me. I had good, loving parents.

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.