“When so much money is involved in these movies, someone somewhere is going to try to screw you.”

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.

Losing fights, or even winning fights, can be heartbreaking, and you can throw that away, but the truth is that it does make our lives better.

People really need to show up early to hear Hollis Brown. They are just an unbelievable live band.

The group is the more important part, and you have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you’re in a group of people that you work with.

People ask me if I have stage fright. I say, “God, no, I’m completely comfortable there. I have rest-of-the-day fright.”

All my songs are where I am.

The nice thing about being on stage is it’s not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I’m up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.

It’s always music first, or melody and words together, but never words first.

I think the biggest, saddest thing that happens in our lives is that we just don’t embrace the things that could make it better because they don’t seem to make it better at any given moment or we can’t decide how to get across the aisle to that person.

If you don’t find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow.

I’d like to have younger people around me and that I’ll be involved with them a lot more now, as opposed to me being the main focal point.

There’s no luck involved in chess. You just have to work at it.

Getting to be involved with fashion is one of the coolest things I’ve done.

I would get very involved with political issues and stuff like that. And now, I still have an opinion on everything, but I try to balance staying informed and having a positive attitude.

I remained a fan. But what happens when you’re so involved is you start spending all your time based on the music that you’re involved with, you just don’t have as much time.

My dad was a city councilman and a county commissioner, so I grew up involved and engaged in the political process.

And then all of a sudden that starts disappearing from the book, and just about everything I’m talking about from that point on are the records that I’m totally involved in.

Basically, for any complex to be sustainable needs to have a balance between two factors: resilience and efficiency. These two factors can be calculated from the structure of the network that is involved in a complex system.