Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

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.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

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

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

I actually don’t want a throne at all, because I don’t view myself as a queen; I view myself as one of my fans.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

My imagination is a twisted place.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

Life is better when people are working, happy, and spending money.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.