I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

When I see myself as an old woman, I just think about being happy. And hopefully, I’ll still be fly.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.

Meditation is a great way to keep my body well-centered while juggling shooting schedules and recording sessions.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

Hatred is settled anger.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

When it comes to our everyday habits, it’s important to ask: ‚Am I putting God first?‘

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

He was so depressed, he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian.

If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret… if you have any sense, and if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

There are phases in life which surface at times, and it makes you understand that despite you working hard, everything what you are doing is probably not enough. That’s when you need to look around, and beyond.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

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.

All of our problems start in our minds.

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

A man’s own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer’s block… Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can’t get it out, I start feeling bad about myself – a lot of self-loathing.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.