I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don’t just want to possess it, it will find you.

Music is in my DNA!

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

Genius, when young, is divine.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

I’m not a person who defends myself very often. I kind of let my actions speak for me.

I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.

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.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.

My enthusiasm seems to cause my world to endlessly offer me cooperative, co-creating experiences. I’m willing and I’m eager, and not just about my writing – I feel the same way about staying in shape, enjoying my family, giving a lecture, or whatever it may be.

What is past is prologue.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Miracles come in moments. Be ready and willing.

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

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?

I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

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.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

My mom cleaned toilets for a long time, and she’d seen a lot of terrible things, but she was still the strength of our family. And there are women like that all across the country – all around the world – who show that type of fortitude.

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

A lot of the stuff I do in terms of PR, I learned it from Muhammad Ali.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

Basketball is my passion, I love it. But my family and friends mean everything to me. That’s what’s important. I need my phone so I can keep in contact with them at all times.

When you have nothing important or interesting to say, don’t let anyone persuade you to say it.

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‚tap-dancing to work.‘

I always wanted a great love affair: something that feels big and full, really honest, and enough. No moment should feel slight, false, or a little off. For me, it had to be everything.

God wants to use you to make other people happy! And the happier you make others, the happier you will be because you reap what you sow.

The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.

I like to work with artists from around the world. There are so many new inspiring filmmakers.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.