No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

Don't let others expectations direct the course of your life.

The misapprehension about me is that I am some loud, rampant maniac. I am actually very pensive and quiet.

You have moments of clarity, things become clear to you that you didn't understand before. But there's never any making ends meet or finding any time of longstanding peace of mind about something.

I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.

You cant just trust to luck; you have to really listen to what that character is telling you.

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.

The comedies, the tragedies we see played out on this earth before us, don't last. But we are eternal spirits. These events will come and go, but the planes of light and nirvana will always be there.

[Jeffrey Lewis is] The best lyricist working in the US today.

Like any child raised on tales of magical worlds beyond paintings and mirrors and wardrobes, I had yearned to enter Middle Earth, to reach through.

What I was trying to construct was relative symmetry, where it seems clear that the shapes have arrived through consideration.