As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

There are certain nights you and your image just aren’t in the same bed.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

I don’t think there’s an option for me to fall in love slowly or at medium speed. I either do, or I don’t.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Fear is exciting for me.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. 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.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

I don’t want people to think of me as sexy.

And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

People take the little bit of information they’re fed, and they draw a picture of who you are. Most of the time, it’s wrong.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.

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

When we make progress quickly, it feeds our emotions. Then, when there’s a period of waiting or we hit a plateau, we find out how committed we really are and whether we’re going to see things through to the finish or quit.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

Your emotions are very unstable and should never be the foundation for direction in your life.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.