I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.

I love New York. I’m a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

True friends stab you in the front.

Even an animal, if you show genuine affection, gradually trust develops… If you always showing bad face and beating, how can you develop friendship?

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

The only answer to fear is faith in God, knowing He loves you unconditionally and individually.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

As I grow up, the lessons I learn in love and relationships and how we treat each other are hopefully maturing – hopefully.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

We must use time creatively.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

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 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.

He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

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.

Marriage is the death of hope.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit ‚how-to-parent‘ strategies both seductive and dangerous.

I was gutted to leave my boyfriend at home when I started my tour, but taking my pillow was like taking a little bit of him with me.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

WWE is a space where I thrived, and I loved, and I still do. I love connecting with an audience; that is the greatest thing about going back to WWE.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, ‚What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?‘ And, ‚How does creativity apply across the board?‘

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

I doubt that the Lord cares much which honorable vocation you choose. But He does care if you love one another and serve one another.

I think it is a sin to look at another person as inferior to yourself because of race or because of ethnic background, and I think the greatest thing to do is to pray that God will give you love for them, and I do.

We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.

I’ve got a crush on my backing singer.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.