Joshua Quotes

Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.

I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.

I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.

We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes for honest communication.

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.

If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

Things could be worse and things could be so much better.

That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

One trick, known as the journey method or 'memory palace,' is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind's eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember.

Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.

Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.

Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.

Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.

I don't know if I would refer to myself as a local celebrity.

Looking back on myself as a little kid, I see seeds of entrepreneurship.

At one point, I was painting shells and selling them at gas stations for five cents. I was six years old or something.

We are the market, we know what we want.

Romance says, ' I want it now!'. Wisdom urges patience

Not everyone deserves to be a musician, you get lucky enough to be one.

Any band on their first couple records is just trying to keep up with their inspiration.

Foolishly play with the fires of rumor, only to risk being burned by its treacherous flames.

You got to risk something to be able to give something, you know?

I'm not politically correct; I never said I was.

It's fun to toy around with press stuff a little bit, because in many ways it's not a real world.

All I really care about is that I'm being honest and I'm real and I'm coming from a real place.

I like to make the music that I really love. You're supposed to make your favorite music that no one else played, and I'd like to just keep it at that and not really change it at all.

Guitar solos, to me, should be a really articulate way to make fun of guitar solos.

I've always heard music in my head since I was a little kid, so I've always played towards that. If I felt bad, that's what I did.

A homemade affair that's just in time for Halloween.

I've been playing live gigs since I was 13. I really don't know how to do anything else, and please God strike me down.

I don't mind saying what's on my mind.

I think I learned years ago when I went to Hawaii that you don't bring puka shells back. You've got to be careful of your vacation purchases.

When you try to put everything into music, there's no room left to try to make you think we're cool. We know you think we're cool.

The music as a whole is selfish, but the musicians aren't," "The song may go on forever but it's not about competition within the band; it's about playing as a band.

I like to write about things that are dark or twisted. Where the poetry seems to be is when you start in the dark and reach for the light - that's what makes it not depressing to me.

After all, nothing helps to write lyrics more than to mess around with the language.