Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.

Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.

From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.

I refuse to live life with unsettled differences”.

Friendship grows from a caring heart with sense and sensibilities.

That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas.

Things like radical generosity and audacious faith are not produced when we focus on them, but when we focus on the gospel.

If we are going to amend the constitution, shouldn't it be to keep the omos-hay from arrying-may?

Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem. They're no good at all.

The rumors are lies. There were a lot of people said we're not going to play that we don't have a contract. ... We got it worked out got it hammered out.

I would say the main themes are love, loss and life. Although a lot of the songs represent hard times and situations I think my album is positive, the message is things will get better.

Impassioned characters never attain their mark till they have overshot it.

In order to have influence, you have to be influenced.