“If you’ve never stared off into the distance, then your life is a shame.”

I can’t remember all the times I’ve tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

Bravery is what you can do in the face of things that hurt and scare you, but you do it anyway.

Eventually, they’ll just go away, because you will make them sad. That’s something I’ve proven quite adept at doing over the years.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn’t mean you’re fantastic.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.

For all the things I’m losing I might aswell resign myself to try and make a change.

Closeness to other people is really hard, but it’s also a shame because it’s all you want too. But it doesn’t always work.

I think that, often, the people who can make you happy are right there, and having them in your life would make your life better, but you can’t see how to do it.

If you want to really love someone, you’ve got to let go and loosen up and just care.

I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it’s such a common, constant thing in people’s lives – a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it’s just accepted.

You have a career, the reason why we’re still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.

When you’re young and you play music, you have a peer group, you come out of a scene. There’s a lot of people you know, and then you have some success, and it all goes away.

I’ve been playing music most of my life.

Got no place to go, but there’s a girl waitin’ for me down in Mexico. She got a bottle of tequila, a bottle of gin, and if I bring a little music, I could fit right in.

learning must travel the distance from head to heart.

It’s good to have a little distance. If you discuss your love too much, it just damages it.

Your body’s made to run, to walk, to trek long distances and carry things, work in a forest, and hunt animals. You have to keep it alive to function.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

You keep me at a distance when all I want to have you is close.

They say eyes don’t lie, but I mistook the distance in your eyes for depth.

Billy wanted me to stay a safe distance from the most important person in my life. It turned out that his concern was, in the end, unnecessary. I was all too safe now.