I hate smiling. It makes me feel weak and powerless and small. I’ve always been like that; I don’t smile in any pictures.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

The human heart is the same the world over.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

When I don’t feel free and can’t do what I want I just react. I go against it.

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.

I kind of love Cole Miller.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

All you need is love.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

‚Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.

Hatred is settled anger.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

I’m not a photographer, so I didn’t get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That’s the world that I’m moving in, in terms of acting and giving a performance.

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

If I cry, it’s because I’m very angry and I can’t do anything about it because I’ve run into a dead end. That’s when the tears would come down.

Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength.

I have no human feelings.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Actually, you have to be a little bit in love with your leading man and vice versa. If you’re going to portray love, you have to feel it. You can’t do it any other way. But you don’t carry it beyond the set.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

I have fun out there on the court, smiling, laughing, trying to have good demeanor.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

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.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

When Clark Gable died, I cried for 2 days straight. I couldn’t eat or sleep.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.