“Something gets lost when you translate. It’s hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.”

It’s easier to describe that shame, that horrible feeling of not being able to control your own life.

For me, there’s a fine line between telling a story that’s fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it’s bloodless, a little too fictional.

Clearly in this business you have to contend with a lot of that.

Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It’s uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.

You know what, the drummer is my manager. He’s busy. And I’m busy. I don’t need the dough, though. But having said that, there’s a limit to how much bad music I wanna play.

In the ’70s, everybody thought drugs were just good times. People didn’t really know about drug addiction, or that such a thing existed.

I don’t envy anybody trying to start a career right. There really is no music business left, in a lot of ways.

No, the moth don’t care when he sees the flame The moth don’t care if the flame is real ‘Cause flame and moth got a sweetheart deal.

Life is a series of problems to figure out how to solve gracefully and with dignity. That is what life is and I can’t see it any other way.

It’s in the dictionary. And when I find what it is, I’ll write it down in case it comes up again, I’ll be certain to avoid it.

Telling what you feel, trying to talk about what’s important to you, does not make you weaker.

When things are really great, it just means everything’s in it’s place.

You drew a bird that was here, a kind of sweet chanticleer. But with a terrible fear that the cage couldn’t tame

And if that’s your sole motivation, it’s going to reflect that narcissistic greed and you’re going to hear it in the music.

There’s a lot of music that sounds like it’s literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.

Anybody who cares less about wanting to be cool, I think, is more interesting.

I am learning on every job I do. There is something new every time.

Debating against him is no fun, say something insulting and he looks at you like a whipped dog.

I love bows, … And I feel some couture pots coming on.

There is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays its prime minister, 250 times as much as it pays its members of Parliament and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion.

Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.

And I’ve discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.

If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Everything has technique to it. So if there’s something you wanna try out, I think it’s always good to get a trainer or listen to people who know what they’re doing.