“I’ve written songs sober and I’ve written songs high.”

Who put the bomp in the bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp, who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong?

You’ve got to really be able to accept the rejection.

A guitar riff played on a piano doesn’t come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.

I think if one wants to be in a continual state of insanity one should stay married to that writing partner.

We became the songs we wrote.

One other thing, if it’s possible, as songwriters, you should also develop yourself as record producers.

There’s so much fear involved in trying to do something you don’t know how to do that drugs and alcohol can become a big part of your life if you have an addictive personality or are very unsure, which most songwriters are.

I think that most writers who wait until they’re inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.

I get a different kind of lyric from someone else that might make me go in a different musical direction.

I also used to work in the Catskill Mountains as a bus boy, and I performed in talent shows.

It’s amazing how a competitive nature can turn a negative into something positive.

It’s very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there’s no creative crop to harvest.

You have to be very brave in that first writing session.

Probably most successful songwriters have an innate songwriting ability.

No matter what you do, you’ll never run away from you.

If I waited for inspiration every time I sat down to write a song I probably would be a plumber today.

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.

Being sober on a bus is, like, totally different than being drunk on a bus.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.

Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can.

The sober facts of geology shuffled, so as to play a rogue’s game; phrenology (that sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry); spontaneous generation; transmutation of species; and I know not what; all to be swallowed, without tasting and trying

[Vestiges begins] from principles which are at variance with all sober inductive truth.

We get sufferings in life so that we become sober and listen to Krishna’s message.

Nothing in Nature’s sober found, But an eternal Health goes round. Fill up the Bowl then, fill it high