William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

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.

It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

I’m not ashamed to say I fear something.

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

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

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

Anger cannot be dishonest.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

The word ‚happy‘ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

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

Fear is real, but so is love.

In one day, I have times where I’m feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I’m the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Some people love so hard that they can’t control those emotions when they’re at their deepest point.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

No, I’m not anguished and tormented.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

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.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egotism. So I distance myself, because I feel everything.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

Love is trembling happiness.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

I’m so nervous. I’ve always been nervous, ever since I was a kid.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.