We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Fear is exciting for me.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.

I’m constantly thinking.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

I don’t think I get that upset over things.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

It is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

I don’t feel bitterness, I don’t feel anger towards anybody. Fighting is never emotional to me.

I hate smiling. It makes me feel weak and powerless and small. I’ve always been like that; I don’t smile in any pictures.

Of course I get hurt.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

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.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

Love is a state of being.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

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.

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

Nature is not human hearted.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.