“I met my wife because we were both going out with the same guy.”

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.

I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.

I’m always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don’t even take what I am seriously.

I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.

One shouldn’t be too inquisitive in life Either about God’s secrets or one’s wife.

People will laugh at me, but when they ask me to make a wish for the next life, I will say I want the same parents, same brother and sister, same wife, same friends.

Religion is preserved by wealth; knowledge by diligent practice; a king by conciliatory words; and a home by a dutiful housewife.

I could lie and say my wife cooks for me, but she doesn’t. My wife has never learnt cooking but she has great cooks at home.

In India a farmhand was caught in the act with his cow. He said he had bad eyesight and thought it was his wife.

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It’s very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

My wife was delighted with the home I had given her amid the prairies of the far west.

Religion is preserved by wealth; knowledge by diligent practice; a king by conciliatory words; and a home by a dutiful housewife.