“Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.”

You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

A corpse is what’s left after waking too often.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there’s no point in it….for me, every act of the art of solving a mystery.

The difference between something good and something great is attention to detail.

Different people have different ways of doing things. For me, becoming a songwriter first and falling in love with the Nashville songwriting community and the process of songs and getting better and putting more in what I wanted to say, was absolutely vital in me even wanting to be an artist.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn’t isolated, something is wrong.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.