I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

After getting out of the service and going into baseball I never wanted to do anything else.

A lot of people like to do certain things, but they’re not that good at it. Keep going through the things that you like to do, until you find something that you actually seem to be extremely good at. It can be anything.

I refuse to accept other people’s ideas of happiness for me. As if there’s a ‚one size fits all‘ standard for happiness.

I’m not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living.

If I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.

I wanted to write.

I’m really interested in smells. I think I’d like to own a perfumery someday.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

The essential lesson I’ve learned in life is to just be yourself. Treasure the magnificent being that you are and recognize first and foremost you’re not here as a human being only. You’re a spiritual being having a human experience.

Man is a universe within himself.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mode but the true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives the passion that she shows. The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

In this knowledge-worker age, it’s now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs – so the pressure to do well is really high.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

Football changed my life and it gave me a platform to get out my aggression and it gave me a sense of value.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‚leaders‘ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

Make bold choices and make mistakes. It’s all those things that add up to the person you become.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

The people of Northern Ireland have sorted out my whole life.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

I’ve never been a boyfriend kind of girl.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.

I think if I keep working in the way that I am, from the heart and from passion and with love, well, the fruits of that will keep coming.

It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.