“Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where noone notices the contrast of white on white.”

A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.

Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren’t hits.

I’m so busy trying to breathe through the pain that I’m breathing through the pain of being with people, and that is no way to spend a life.

It’s a shame really because a couple days in Oklahoma will open your eyes to how much better it would be if the rest of the country was filled with a few more people from Oklahoma.

You want to embrace, but I can’t figure out how to hold on to it.

I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal.

When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely.

A lot of life is about how you feel relating to dealing with this person or that person

I’m not a spiritual person at all, but I do think that the world doesn’t have to be as lonely as it is.

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

You get so used to doing it that you start to believe it’s simply what everyone does. It makes for an atmosphere of unwelcome that penetrates much of our modern life.

I’ve spent most of my life living in cities where people are obsessed with looking down on people from everywhere else.

There is nothing more important you can ever do for this world than to wake up and be a part of it.

If you wrap yourself in daffodils I will wrap myself in pain…

That’s where the songs come from: that’s what I’d most want people to understand. What sounds good or looks good, that’s nothing. The only worthwhile thing in art is seeing someone else’s heart.

You have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you’re in a group of people that you work with. It’s not so much, do they make you feel good when you’re around them all the time; it’s how can you make everyone feel comfortable together.

A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.

Painting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this.

By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.

People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it’s really the position of line that’s important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it.

Keep it simple: In general, interfaces should use simple geometric forms, minimal contours, and a restricted color palette comprised primarily of less-saturated or neutral colors balanced with a few high contrast accent colors that emphasize important information.

But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

The contrast was incredible.