“The trick is to have a career and have a family. It’s like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.”

Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.

Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you’re dead.

Got a head full of lightning, a hat full of rain.

I’ll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past.

I like Thelonious Monk, he’s so gnarled, he’s like a piece of machinery that’s pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own.

The dog won’t bite if you beat Him with a bone.

And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming.

Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

I put food on the table and roof overhead. But I’d trade it all tomorrow for the highway instead.

I’m not fighting for justice. I am not fighting for freedom. I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here.

Bill Hicks – blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, and brain specialist. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built.

Well I got a bad liver and broken heart, yeah, I drunk me a river since you tore me apart.

I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.

Not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at.

A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.

I start from scratch with each movie; I wipe the slate and I certainly don’t rely on some bag of acting tricks I’ve amassed over the years.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they’d word something or how they’d inflect it.

What happens with every role, you have to trick yourself, you have to creatively find ways to explore the mental state of your character.

Planning a career, I always find a tricky thing, because I don’t have much of a plan, really.

But here’s the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we’d lose them.