“That’s where the songs come from: that’s what I’d most want people to understand. What sounds good or looks good, that’s nothing. The only worthwhile thing in art is seeing someone else’s heart.”

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.

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.

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.

I can’t remember all the times I’ve tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

Bravery is what you can do in the face of things that hurt and scare you, but you do it anyway.

Eventually, they’ll just go away, because you will make them sad. That’s something I’ve proven quite adept at doing over the years.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

Little girls are the nicest things that happen to people.

The ego is kind of a big, unwieldy thing. It’s not so easily tamed or subdued.

The lyrics are not an important thing to me. In fact, it can be a distraction.

I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn’t move me, and I tried to analyze.

I was always interested in figuring things out. I’d do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.

If there is no passion in your life, then have you really lived? Find your passion, whatever it may be. Become it, and let it become you and you will find great things happen FOR you, TO you and BECAUSE of you.