“You don’t understand what makes you understand what makes your life better until you take something that makes it so much worse and you embrace that.”

I feel like I’ve been in love, but I have stood aside from it over and over again in my life. It’s all you want, but it’s terrifying.

. If this person makes you feel good, then they’re a person to be around; if they don’t, they’re not. Being in a band is different.

Being in a band is about making the band the priority.

You aren’t really writing about what you did; you’re writing about how you feel.

Over and over again in my life, I find closeness to other people and proximity to other people really painful; that’s part of my mental illness, social anxiety.

I’m really good in a crisis, because I don’t panic.

I’m really good in pain. I snapped my leg in half on stage and played a whole show. But I can’t sit there with someone that loves me.

There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process.

My life isn’t necessarily more important than anyone else’s: I’m just better in talking about it.

Your misery is everyone else’s entertainment.

I think I’d been limiting myself in some ways just writing in first person all the time.

We waste a lot of our lives sometimes. There are people sitting across from us who would make the whole world better if we spent more time with them in it, but we can’t get across that gully.

It’s impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It’s the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.

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

But what you realise after you’ve been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don’t have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. ‘That worked for everyone else,’ God said.

And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that’s funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there’s all kinds of advantages to it.

And terror is indiscriminate murder of civilians to make a political point.

When you make a bet, you’re saying something.

I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I’ve liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film.

Other times when I hear the wind blow I feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth being born.

They must be very careful and think about enrolling in training first, they must make a thoughtful decision before actually doing it.

Those allies who failed to join us will regret it. They’re making a mistake.