I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.

However, there’s no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

Like so many American families, our families weren’t asking for much. They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did… in fact, they admired it.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

It needs time. Nobody wants to hear it, but that’s the truth: if you want to have success in the future, you have to be ready to work now.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‚What’s in it for me?‘

There is no doubt that some plant food, such as oatmeal, is more economical than meat, and superior to it in regard to both mechanical and mental performance. Such food, moreover, taxes our digestive organs decidedly less, and, in making us more contented and sociable, produces an amount of good difficult to estimate.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

In the United States, I am a great success, but I am not a celebrity.

Affluence means influence.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

Surface R&B doesn’t work any more. The whole heartthrob thing, songs about unrealistic love and tearing your shirt off every show – that’s not really where it’s at any more. It’s becoming harder for those guys to sell records, and harder for them to succeed.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Of course, I do everything for money.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

I made an album I’m very proud of, and that’s about it.

I was sure I’d set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth – that I hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if ‚The Big Trail‘ had been a success and launched me as a star.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‚Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.‘ I’m thinking, ‚That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.‘

The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.

Israel was not created in order to disappear – Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

I just know that I’m a fan of all different kinds of genres. You’re supposed to be free doing music, and that’s how I feel.

Successful people will always tell you you can do something. It’s the people who have never accomplished anything who will always discourage you from trying to achieve excellent things.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

We have a big appetite for putting people down but, at the heart of everyone, there’s enough room for all of us to succeed.

I’m an iPod person.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

I didn’t know how to deal with success. If there was a Rock Star 101, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Music is like film to me.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There’s no tricks. It’s honesty with big melodies.

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.