Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Silence is more eloquent than words.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

The greatest story of all is Colonel Sanders. He didn’t start until he was sixty-six on a freeway bypass for his chicken shop. Anything is possible!

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

If a man does his best, what else is there?

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

The only length of life that seems to satisfy the longings of the human heart is life everlasting.

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

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

But when I hear a great song, I can’t help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

We represent a hustler. I think we represent inspiration. I think we represent, you know, staying down. I think we represent building yourself up from the bootstraps.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

I believe that one person can make a difference.

I like to choreograph and create and design the costumes and do it all and then step back and watch it and then move on to the next project.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

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

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

The beauty of me being on stage is I have a voice.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Everywhere I go I find that people… both leaders and individuals… are asking one basic question, ‚Is there any hope for the future?‘ My answer is the same, ‚Yes, through Jesus Christ.‘

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.

Passions are the gales of life.

Our best thoughts come from others.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

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

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.