The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.

If I have something to say, I want it to be meaningful.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‚Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in your community.‘

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

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

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

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

Silence is safer than speech.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

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.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

Right now, we don’t have a very good relation with creation.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

There are really two core principles at play here. There’s giving people a voice so that people can express their opinions. Then, there’s keeping the community safe, which I think is really important. We’re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I hate the idea of genres.

When I say ‚Crush your enemy‘, I don’t literally mean it.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

Beauty without expression is boring.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

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

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through 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 way ‚Lux‘ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.