Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you’re listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

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

My brain and body and nervous system, they see a plane ride, a long plane trip, as an opportunity to sleep with nothing coming in, nothing to do. I just go offline the minute I’m on the plane.

When you’re outside, and everything is highland, it’s like nature has its own sound, and that’s one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

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.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Guys need attention. They need that nourishment, that little stroke of the ego that gets them by every now and then.

If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

Sleep is the best meditation.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you’re allowed to fail.

I tend to stay up late, not because I’m partying but because it’s the only time of the day when I’m alone and don’t have to be performing.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

Throw off your worries when you throw off your clothes at night.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

I’m definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working – if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

Whatever position I occupied, it was the result of colleagues – of my comrades in the movement – who had decided in their wisdom to use me for the purpose of focusing the attention of the country and the international community on me.

The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you.

What makes me happy is just curling up in with my mom in her bed and watching a marathon of ‚CSI‘ and ‚Grey’s Anatomy‘ episodes with pints of ice cream.

This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona – no lime. If the phone rings, I won’t answer until I’m done.

I have no trouble sleeping.

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

Meditation helps me to calm down.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

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

A mother defends herself with a heart filled with love before doing so with words. I wonder whether there is any love for the church in the hearts of those who pay so much attention to the scandals.

When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

I think some of my colleagues‘ spicier lines are distracting. They draw attention away from what the justice is trying to say.

To do nothing is also a good remedy.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.

Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

Knowing that the time to sleep has come, the Lord sleeps, and does well in sleeping. Often, when we have been fretting and worrying, we should have glorified God far more had we literally gone to sleep.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

Never get out of bed before noon.

I am alone a lot, which is good. I need that time to just be alone after a long day, just decompress. So, I go to either my house or the hotel, or my apartment, or whatever – wherever I am, I go home and I watch TV and I sit there, with my cat, and I just watch TV or go online, check my emails.

What a nice night for an evening.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

I like to take it easy.

I’m very type-A, and many things in my life are about control and domination, but eating should be a submissive experience, where you let down your guard and enjoy the ride.

None of my kids want to be actors. They are actually very interested in being musicians. I think they like the process of film from the outside. Mad is interested in editing. Pax loves music and deejaying.

Classical – perhaps I should say ‚orchestral‘ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

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

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.