Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

I want the world to see my body.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

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.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

Fashion is that thing that saved me from being sad.

The kids never listen to you, especially the youngest ones.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‚Nice doggie‘ until you can find a rock.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

I’m so not macho. It’s crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

Be not a slave of words.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life. My way of dealing with frustration is to shut down and to think and speak logically.

I wanted to write.

If he invited you out, he’s got to pay.

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

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

If I have the chance to say something, I will say it – but that doesn’t obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

It is not possible for a man to be elegant without a touch of femininity.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

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

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Kids who have an understanding of how and why their feelings are what they are are much more likely to talk to us about what’s happening, and they have better skills to work it out.

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

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.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

I think one of the basic reasons men make good friends is that they can make up their minds quickly.

Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is ‚elephant‘.

The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your life, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there’s nothing really to talk about.

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.

When your mother asks, ‚Do you want a piece of advice?‘ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.

I understand aggressiveness in only one way: being prepared to hurt yourself, not someone else.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It’s too controversial.