“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination.

What do stars do? They shine.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won’t remember and that she can’t even let herself think about because that’s when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it’s always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you’re doing something.

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane.

To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.

You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future; but an excuse can last for life.

So for me, fashion was about standing out as an individual – and it helped me get the attention that most people try to get with publicity stunts or by doing other crazy things. But I just let the attention come to me naturally, and I think some of that has to do with my fashion.

As long as you’re giving up quality records and you’re makin’ hit records, people are always gonna want to hear a hit and they’ll always want to be attached to something that’s doin’ great.

I always try to give my own albums space in between so I have time to create a new sound and give time for people to miss me. You have to come out fresh and reinvent yourself.

The most important decision I’ve made in business? The choices of people I have around me. When I first started I brought everybody with me, my homies from the neighborhood, criminals. I just said, ‘Come on everybody, we made it.’ Then I had to realize we didn’t make it. I made it.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was rushed to the floor. Several hundred pages. Nobody read it … But people voted because they were fearful and people said there could be another attack and Americans will blame me if I don’t vote on this.

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.