“I don’t think that you should be per­fectly candid and frank about the intimate details of your personal life with the public at large. Subsequently, it creates consider­able personal problems.”

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

All that you’ve loved is all you own.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

My wife called me a mule. She once said, “I didn’t marry a man; I married a mule!” I kept thinking about it. It was in the back of my head. I think it makes a good title for an album.

You’re innocent when you dream.

I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

Time is just memory Mixed in with Desire.

Well, it’s either kiss me or kill me, that’s how I see it.

There’s always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby.

I guess I’ve always lived upside down when I want things I can’t have.

I sold a quart of blood and bought a half a pint of scotch.

I can’t listen to so much music at the same time. I think you really have to have a diet. You’re just processing too much, there’s no place to put it. If you go a long time without hearing music, then you hear music that nobody else hears.

When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.

We are all just monkeys with money and guns.

It is impossible that there should be so much providence in the last details, and none in the first principles. Then the arts of prophecy and of healing, which are part of the cosmos, come of the good providence of the Gods.

Once you get the right image the details aren’t that important.

Reveal every detail of how you feel to them with eyes wide open.

Every shrink knows that it’s not the event itself but how you respond to it that tells the story. Take ten assorted individuals, expose them all to the same life trial, and they will each suffuse it with exquisite personal detail and meaning.

Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we’re absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.

In the dead silence, all the details suddenly fell into place for me with a burst of intuition. Something Edward didn’t want me to know. Something that Jacob wouldn’t have kept from me, It was never going to end, was it?

Everybody is worried about dying, but the cause of death is birth, so if you don’t want to die, you don’t get born!

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.