Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that’s not so bad; but New York City?

A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.

I’ve had no contact with my daughter for years. That’s her choice. Anyway, you move on. If people don’t want to bother with me, fine. You know, God bless them, and move on.

You can’t be in love with a Google search.

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.

The best thing is to always keep honest people around, because when you have a bunch of yes men around that know that you’re making a mistake but let you go on with it, that’s when it ruins your mind state as an artist.

When we turn to one another for counsel we reduce the number of our enemies.

They do not love that do not show their love.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow – that’s vulnerability.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they’re not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don’t care about money, and that’s not my problem.

I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That’s where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It’s having backbone.

I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

I think that you can love people without it being the great love.

Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

For I can raise no money by vile means.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

One of the things I’ve told men over and over and over and over is if you’re being rejected by all the women that you approach, it’s not the women!

No matter what love throws at you, you have to believe in it.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

Any man who doesn’t love his mama can’t be no friend of mine.

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, providing there are not too many.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows – marriage does.

You don’t want to live your life and then meet someone. You want to share your life with someone. That’s what I’m missing right now.

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted.

Let’s be honest – tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn’t realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being straight with you. It’s also not who we are as Americans.

My mom and I have always been there for each other. We had some tough times, but she was always there for me.

Alimony – the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

Love is an interesting thing.

For me, one of the toughest things about Valentine’s Day is that it gets geared up as the day to profess your love. See, T-E-S-T – that’s a bad word that doesn’t go with L-O-V-E.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

I’ve laid my friends bare.

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.