I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

I’m perpetually lonely.

I hate letting my teammates down. I know I’m not going to make every shot. Sometimes I try to make the right play, and if it results in a loss, I feel awful. I don’t feel awful because I have to answer questions about it. I feel awful in that locker room because I could have done something more to help my teammates win.

Transforming yourself into a deep listener will not only prove more amusing as you open your mind to their mind, but you will gain the most invaluable lessons about human psychology.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

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

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

Regarding marriage, it – somehow, it didn’t happen. One fellow in such a big family not getting married is not an issue.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

My wife and I love each other very much.

You don’t want to live your life and then meet someone. You want to share your life with someone. That’s what I’m missing right now.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

It’s only I have seen enough of it and the funny thing is now, I know that I’m skinny, because I know there are even smaller clothes in the store. I think I’m big, when I was big, I never thought about it.

When you’re 40, you can’t ride the fence anymore. You gotta make definite decisions about your life.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

Listening to and understanding our inner sufferings will resolve most of the problems we encounter.

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

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

I came up from a difficult background.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

Enemies are so stimulating.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

I’ve been searching for ways to heal myself, and I’ve found that kindness is the best way.

To be social is to be forgiving.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.