“I think that, often, the people who can make you happy are right there, and having them in your life would make your life better, but you can’t see how to do it.”

You have a career, the reason why we’re still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.

When you’re young and you play music, you have a peer group, you come out of a scene. There’s a lot of people you know, and then you have some success, and it all goes away.

I’ve been playing music most of my life.

Got no place to go, but there’s a girl waitin’ for me down in Mexico. She got a bottle of tequila, a bottle of gin, and if I bring a little music, I could fit right in.

Time and time again I can’t please myself.

There’s people who think what they need and what they deserve in their lives is a lot worse than what they actually do, so they get themselves involved in things that are needlessly painful: brutal relationships, abusive relationships.

A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.

Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren’t hits.

I’m so busy trying to breathe through the pain that I’m breathing through the pain of being with people, and that is no way to spend a life.

It’s a shame really because a couple days in Oklahoma will open your eyes to how much better it would be if the rest of the country was filled with a few more people from Oklahoma.

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where noone notices the contrast of white on white.

You want to embrace, but I can’t figure out how to hold on to it.

I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal.

When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely.

A lot of life is about how you feel relating to dealing with this person or that person

I’m not a spiritual person at all, but I do think that the world doesn’t have to be as lonely as it is.

Doing what you were born to do … That’s the way to be happy.

What I say is that we’re capable of a transcendent response, and I think it makes us happy. And I do think beauty produces a transcendent response.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

I’m just a guy, doing okay. But I’m a happy guy doing okay.

Everybody was happy my brother was locked up.

There’s something really interesting about that as a trend, that whole idea of lifestyle and being happy in your surroundings.

No medicine is more valuable , none more efficacious.

I just knew how to smile.