“Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud.”

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

This music was her-the real plain her…This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard.

The writer must hew the phantom rock.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.

There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.

And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.

Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.

People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.

We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?” – and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? …They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

You’ve got to be hard, like the rock in that old rock & roll.

Later in the evening when you lie awake in bed with the echoes from the amplifiers ringing in your head.

Country music belongs to America.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

I would pale in comparison to rock and rollers with my haircut. I would be a lightweight.

The second ‘Postal Service’ album is threatening to become the ‘Chinese Democracy’ of indie rock. It will come out eventually, or maybe it won’t.

I was always brought up to have a cup of tea at halfway up a rock face.

The rock and roll spirit. I learned a lot of that because I worked with Buddy Holly. I played bass with him, and he taught me a lot about that.