The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

People like to hear the word ‚love.‘

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, ‚Thus far and no farther.‘

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

I was called really horrible, profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people, and my schoolwork suffered at one point.

To live is to think.

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

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

I have good days and bad days.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

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

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

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

I’ve learned that men and women who are living wholehearted lives really allow themselves to soften into joy and happiness. They allow themselves to experience it.

Love is a state of being.

Joy is prayer; joy is strength: joy is love; joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

I’ve had sleep paralysis.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

If I panic, everyone else panics.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.