“Never have your wallet with you onstage. It’s bad luck. You shouldn’t play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.”

The ocean doesn’t want me today, But I’ll come back tomorrow to play. The riptide is waging And the life guard’s away But the ocean doesn’t want me today.

I don’t like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, ‘Oh God, another one bites the dust.’

Don’t look back, because someone might be gaining on you.

It’s rather mystifying when you think about writing songs – where they come from, and how they’re born.

You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.

They say that I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with. And they say that like it’s a bad thing.

I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

I never told the truth so i can never tell a lie.

Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don’t get out much. It’s true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.

The Universe is making music all the time.

Their memory’s like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can’t remember Tell the things you can’t forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

But then I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong. I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.

When your down on your luck and you’ve lost all your dreams theres nothing like a campfire and a can of beans.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side.

I’m not a good enough musician to like completely master something in a couple of days and turn it around.

I am a musician. My passion for music has obliterated everything in its path for my entire life.

I never wanted to be a performer, that was not one of my goals. I wanted to be a musician and that was that.

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

Michael Jackson wanted to be in Men in Black II. He told me he had seen the first Men in Black in Paris and had stayed behind and sat there and wept.

Music proposes. Sound disposes.

I tried to give my career a shot from Barranquilla, but the musicians would never show up. It was just not taken seriously.