Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.

Sometimes, I’m very embarrassed.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.

Derbies are always difficult to play because you have to handle the pressure. There’s no advantage or disadvantage for either side.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

In Germany, they all thought I was a bit mental, very emotional.

It’s not possible to stop love.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

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

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

Doing Saturday Night Live definitely affects my relationship with my girlfriend and with my family, because you feel so much pressure to do well that night. But I think everyone’s grown to accept that and so they give me my space at the show.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

I don’t feel pressure in a negative way. I like pressure. I feel excitement and calm at the same time. No pressure, no diamonds. I want pressure: pressure creates drama, creates emotion.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

We all have two lives: an inner life and an outer life. Your inner life is your soul life, which includes your mind, will and emotions. Your outer life is your physical life. And while God cares about every detail of your life, He is more concerned with your inner life than your outer life.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized that to many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.

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.

Love is the one wild card.

‚Fame‘ exhausts me.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

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

I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can’t not be what everyone says I am. But I don’t feel like an icon.

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.

If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

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.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

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.

It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‚What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?‘ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.