You can't go home again

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.

America - it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.

I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.

Making the world safe for hypocrisy.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

A drop of faith can create a hailstorm of success.

How many men with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most?

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.

Don't be afraid of new arenas.

I tell my daughter Nyssa, you should respect my work and I will also respect yours when you grow up, "Work is worship" is what I have told her.

The American has no language, he has a dialect, slang, provincialism, accent and so forth

Make my heart, O heart of the universe, a divine bird that nests only on the throne of God.

I try to keep my ear to the streets without sacrificing who I am as an artist. If a song needs a drum machine I'll use a drum machine. If it needs a drummer, I'll use a real drummer.