I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

For me, being raised in a free America made all the difference.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

Sometimes, you might meet somebody that you love that’s turning into a ‚they.‘ My key is invite them to Miami and take them to the ocean and let them jump off the boat in the ocean, on the sand bar, and cleanse off and pray and then go take a shower, and hopefully the ‚they‘ is out of you.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

Never take anything for granted.

As much as it might look like, to someone else, that I’m successful, I never feel like I’m anywhere. The further I go, I still feel equally further from my eventual goal. Because as I grow, I get more goals. I’m never content.

I’ve never been shy or secretive with the fact that if you walk into my life, you may be walking onto a record.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Love is a state of being.

I’ve arrived at the place if I’m not taking a career risk, I’m not happy. If I’m scared, then I know I’m being challenged.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

There’s a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

I never saw myself as a folk singer.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.

I can’t tell anybody else how to run their life or their business, but I really believe I’ve got a good bead on myself.

The most challenging project I’ve ever done, I think, is every single thing I’ve ever tried to do. It’s never easy.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

When I was old enough to change my name, I changed it to Mr. T so that the first word out of someone’s mouth was ‚Mister,‘ a sign of respect.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

You must do the things you think you cannot do.

I am sure there’s going to be times when I do things wrong that no one’s going to like and everyone’s going to think I’m terrible and rubbish but I know I’m going to go through those times, and it’s just about understanding that that’s going to happen.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

Choose people who lift you up.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of ‚Lives of Girls and Women,‘ I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

I just want to be myself.

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

When you face a ‚performance‘ that might provoke the ‚I’m scared‘ response, choose love and approach your opportunity as a chance to dance with God. It’s more fun than ‚Dancing with the Stars!‘

I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

There’s no formula.

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

Joanne‘ is a progression for me. It was about going into the studio and forgetting that I was famous.