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.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

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 learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

Encouragement to others is something everyone can give. Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money; it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows?

Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with. If he had lived and not been purged, I probably would have joined the Muslims.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

What I remember as a child is that other kids didn’t care about suffering. I always did.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

The future is called ‚perhaps‘, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

Originality is really important.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

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.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

I’m trying to throw a big broad net to try to get people interested in God and believe that He’s for them and has a purpose.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

I was always interested – I mean, it’s kind of part of your job – I was always interested in the camera.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

I want to be an Asian Robert De Niro.