If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

There’s always gonna be rock n‘ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n‘ roll records, and there will always be rock n‘ roll.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

I’ve rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

My mom cleaned toilets for a long time, and she’d seen a lot of terrible things, but she was still the strength of our family. And there are women like that all across the country – all around the world – who show that type of fortitude.

Whatever that means, however you got on that mountain, why not try to climb it? And do it in your own way.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

Environment is very important to me. Sometimes I have to perform during the day for festivals, and my music does not work in the daytime. It is nighttime music.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

The successful men I admired all built their bodies.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

When the players go home, I can’t tell them what to do, so you need to create an atmosphere of trust. I don’t want to think, ‚What are they doing now? Do I need to call them?‘

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

I don’t say very much I don’t really think through. I know that sounds inconsistent with Joe Biden.

Do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

I was a super once – an extra – in ‚Die Fledermaus,‘ and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I never wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. I just wanted to be the first Jackie Chan.

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

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

My music is influenced by L.A. culture.

I love the name of honor, more than I fear death.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

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.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

I have a very eclectic iPod. So I’ve got my cardio people – so it’s anything from Beyonce to some Jay-Z to Janelle Monae, her song ‚Tightrope,‘ that’s a good cardio song. And then I’ve got Sting. I’ve got Mary J. Blige. I’ve got The Beatles. I’ve got Michael Jackson. I try to pick the songs that I personally love.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.