“It’s a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That’s where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.”

Music can change the world because it can change people.

Everybody thinks I’m at death’s door, but I’m not. There’s nothing seriously wrong with me, and my heart is in 100 percent working order. Anything else you may hear is a damn lie!

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

I think when you dissect a joke too much, you have ruined whatever there is in comedy.

That seemed to be the case with most of the teams based in the smaller towns – the fans were more rabid, and they wanted to literally kill the opposition.

Jesus, Jesus help me. I’m alone in this world.

At a certain point, I just felt, you know, God is not looking for alms, God is looking for action.

Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.

When people say, you know, ‘Good teacher,’ ‘Prophet,’ ‘Really nice guy’… this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you’re left with a challenge in that, which is either Jesus was who he said he was or a complete and utter nut case. You have to make a choice on that.

If I ever reach heaven I expect to find three wonders there: first, to meet some I had not thought to see there; second, to miss some I had expected to see there; and third, the greatest wonder of all, to find myself there.

Hockey is a tough game.

It’s stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

As a musician and a songwriter it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Everyone’s got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It’s a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one.

It is impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, being raw.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

The task of history is to hold out for reprobation every evil word and deed, and to hold out for praise every great and noble word and deed.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.