I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

I write all my sermons.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

Empire and liberty.

My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy – it’s serious business.

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

God’s Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm. I love that.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

You can’t put democracy and freedom back into a box.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

God doesn’t dwell in the wooden, stony or earthen idols. His abode is in our feelings, our thoughts.

The true identity theft is not financial. It’s not in cyberspace. It’s spiritual. It’s been taken.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

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.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

All art is quite useless.

I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.

Heaven gives us hope and makes our present burdens easier to bear.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.