There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

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

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

Once you’ve lost your privacy, you realize you’ve lost an extremely valuable thing.

It started to weigh on me that I was responsible for the moves that had made me successful, but I wasn’t reaping the lion’s share of the profits, and that was problematic for me.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

I made bad decisions. I’m not denying that I made bad decisions.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

All of the Vines that were acted & setup & had nice cameras, those weren’t the good Vines. The good Vines were, like, a random little kid in the middle of a forest, like, yelling.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

I am capable of holding the quote-unquote ‚title‘ of leading man. Leading man just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.

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.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

I’d go from film to film and almost detach from one world and jump in another. I was living as these people and not having a self. I didn’t know who I was. And things just get really dark.

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

See, ‚A Time to Kill‘ was the one I got famous off of. Big ka-boom, over one weekend. After that, I did films that I really wanted to do.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

Well, in order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

I don’t have all the answers.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

It’s like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it’s solid so it’s something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

I love eating chocolate cake and ice cream after a show. I almost justify it in my mind as, ‚You were a good boy onstage and you did your show, so now you can have some cake and ice cream.‘

I’m an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.