“I could never, ever talk to my father. I really loved him, but we couldn’t talk about anything together. There was this really British thing that being even remotely emotional was absolutely verboten.”

Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.

Trust nothing but your own experience.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

There’s a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I’ve used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.

If you come from art, you’ll always be art.

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.

Turn and face the strange.

Comfort comes into your house first as guest, then as a host, then finally as the master.

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means.

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.

The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.

I hate albums that are really happy. When I am really happy, I don’t like to hear happy albums, and when I am really sad I don’t wanna hear happy albums… and I tend to gravitate towards the lonely and isolated anyway when I write.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.

I’ll place my love beneath the stars.

If rejection destroys your self-esteem, you’re letting others hold you as an emotional hostage.

There is new hope among people that this dispensation can fulfill their aspirations.

Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew–knew–that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?

I’m very emotional. I think I may go mad in several years’ time.

There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother’s love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans.

I was becoming the cold, emotionally crippled monster I always wanted to be, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. But it was too late. The metamorphosis was already well under way.