Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

Any of us can be happy and have a good attitude when everything is going our way. But I believe it’s the real test of your character and of your faith to say, ‚Things are not going our way, but I’m still being good to people; I’m still attending church; I still have a good attitude.‘

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

Let the people on both sides keep their self-possession, and just as other clouds have cleared away in due time, so will this, and this great nation shall continue to prosper as before.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

You can’t stop everything from happening. But we’ve gotten to a point where we’re certainly trying. If a car doesn’t have four hundred air bags in it, then it’s no good.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

Even the most seemingly unpleasant situations – if you become aligned with it, something good will emerge from that.

The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn’t think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.

When you’re older you want to learn from other people.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world.

Fashion has become so whatever. I don’t think there are any stones left to unturn.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I think a big test we all face in life on a regular basis is that discouragement test. Life’s not always fair, but I believe if you keep doing the right thing, God will get you to where you are.

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

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

‚Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

You’re not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.