Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

Facts are stubborn things.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

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.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

Obama did organize a great large number of people and many enthusiastic people, what’s called in the press ‚Obama’s Army.‘ But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, to introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

God, as Truth, has been for me a treasure beyond price. May He be so to every one of us.

If you’re lying, you’re lying.

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.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?

I left Mainz after 18 years and thought, ‚Next time, I will work with a little less of my heart.‘ I said that because we all cried for a week. The city gave us a goodbye party, and it lasted a week.

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Knowledge is true opinion.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

I need physics more than friends.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

My message to the Americans is the same as to everyone – that is to unite behind the science and to act on the science.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

I believe when it comes to love, there’s something intangible about who we are attracted to, and I don’t think I have a pattern.

Silence is the mother of truth.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

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.

Of course I get hurt.

Time discovers truth.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.

‚Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.

I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

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

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.