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

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.

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.

Time and time again I can’t please myself.

There’s people who think what they need and what they deserve in their lives is a lot worse than what they actually do, so they get themselves involved in things that are needlessly painful: brutal relationships, abusive relationships.

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.

To be around me, you must love food, or I’m the most obnoxious person you’ve ever met.

If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”

People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”

It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the universe around him and to share his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to his own ends and purposes.

I always write about war, love, death, and injustice. There’s plenty of that around, so I never run out of ideas.

Grief is like a wheel that goes around and around the world.

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.

In NASCAR, you can do a lot of banging around and get pretty serious and even get yourself upside down.