I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

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.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

Who’s to say what’s a good voice and not a good voice?

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

It is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.

I think every entertainer’s had nights when things go wrong. I mean you can’t remember everything all the time, and especially if you’re having hard times personally, things going on that you – you know, and then people make it worse. And that makes you feel worse.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

It was always a plan that we were going to have a retail side with what were doing musically, like an Apple store or Nike Town. I wanted something where you can come get everything – ‚Marathon‘ or ‚All Money‘ or ‚Crenshaw‘ – and make it like an experience. Especially with what Crenshaw and Slauson meant to my story.

Life’s too short to deal with other people’s insecurities.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

We have a Boesendorfer piano that I play every day. It keeps my brain and my fingers active.

Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?

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

A person standing in front of an audience without enthusiasm for his subject and his actions is disconnected from his spirit.

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

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

I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

Rather be dead than cool.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

That thing about being an icon, the fifth Beatle, I just found it so freaky.

Exercise is really important to me – it’s therapeutic. So if I’m ever feeling tense or stressed or like I’m about to have a meltdown, I’ll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

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

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

I’m on the autism spectrum. I don’t usually follow social coding and so therefore I go my own way.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn’t want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.