“The phrasing didn’t work as well.”

The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.

I feel I should try to reveal. When you hit it right, you produce an emotional response in the listener that can be cathartic. When you’re wrong, you’re soppy, sentimental.

I don’t feel any pressure from fans. But I’m always in some kind of state of emotional turmoil. I would not describe myself as happy-go-lucky. That’s not to say that I’m not happy.

When I first heard Elvis perform “Bridge Over Trouble Water” it was unbelivable,and I thought to myself, how the hell can I compete with that?

I’m always going forward toward something, and that something is usually an album, because I like to record. I probably like to record more than I like to write.

The dialogue between what’s going on in the world and what’s going on internally seems to be a natural thing – well, it’s natural to me, anyway, to have these thoughts.

I met my old lover on the street last night. She seemed so glad to see me, I just smiled. Then we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers, still crazy after all these years.

Serious numbers will speak to us always.

The more I get to thinking, the less I tend to laugh.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.

I don’t know what I’m going to write when I begin to write. It feels like you are walking down a path, but you can’t see around the bend and you don’t know where you are going to go, which is fun.

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy I said ‘Be careful his bowtie is really a camera’

I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.

There’s something about the sound of a train that’s very romantic and nostalgic and hopeful.

It’s actually very difficult to make something both simple and good.

All I’ve got to do today is smile.

I get a little nauseated, perhaps, when I hear the phrase ‘freedom of the press’ used as freely as it is, knowing that a large part of our proprietorial press is not free at all.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals [sic] some well-known scientific phrase.

It’s strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.

The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.