“What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?”

Families are always rising and falling in America.

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God’s making it in reality.

No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

This above all: be true, be true, be true.

Ugliness without tact is horrible.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one’s self a fool.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Sunlight is painting.

Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

Every time I try to write a song, when I sit down and think I’m going to write, I really want to write a song, and it never works out. It’s always when it hits me unexpectedly on a plane or right before I go to bed, something like that.

To write a song you must have an imagination, to have an imagination you must be free.

I’ve always been able to get inside a song really easily, and if it’s my song, I can make it seem honest.

I hate nothing more than feeling rushed to write a song or feeling like I have to write a song.

Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There’s no tricks. It’s honesty with big melodies.

I think going on tour, having lots of songs and music videos would be super cool.