“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.”

. If this person makes you feel good, then they’re a person to be around; if they don’t, they’re not. Being in a band is different.

Being in a band is about making the band the priority.

You aren’t really writing about what you did; you’re writing about how you feel.

Over and over again in my life, I find closeness to other people and proximity to other people really painful; that’s part of my mental illness, social anxiety.

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.

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

She was really spontaneous and fun and loved to make us sing and dance and paint. She was the coolest person in the world.

Never make predictions, especially about the future.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.

If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

It’s a rule to give all, and it can make the difference if you work more. If you don’t have to give all, and you still win, what’s this?

We can be knowledgable with other men’s knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.