Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.

What thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.

I was a very, very old child. Sometimes you meet a child who seems more like an adult. I think I was that type of child because I had a nearly fatal kidney disease when I was 9 years old.

You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.

I don't remember being a child, and that's why I think I'm so child-like now in my unending curiosity and approach to life.

I think what you can’t see is always what you should be frightened of.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

I take the world very personally. I take history personally; I want to place myself in the larger context.

I make the choice because it is one I can live with.

I couldn’t just start killing people. That wasn’t really my thing.

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

With music, I wasn't curious anymore. There was no dialogue. By the time I stopped, I knew it wasn't going to be gone forever, but it just wasn't the right time for me to care about that.

A good woman would rather be the mother of a genius than the wife of a hero

Humor is an amazing way to talk people down off a ledge.

Fortune makes many loans, but gives no presents.

When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it.

I held out my dad’s magic box and let it o, sure it would smash to the floor. Instead, the box disappeared. “Cool,” I said. “Sure you I can get it back?” “No,” Bast said. “Now come on!

It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.