Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.

You've got the words to change a nation but you're biting your tongue

It would be sad if we lost our instinct and our courage to love and protect.

I wasn't intentionally trying to create my own path or be original, it was just I needed to say certain things and I needed to express myself, and that's how it came out.

I tried to bang down a lot of doors but Virgin were the only label who believed in what I was doing. I ended up with the label that understood what I was trying to do.

Sometimes you feel like a very small drop in this huge ocean.

I want to speak for people that may not feel like they're being spoken for at the moment. And I want to make a connection between the world around us and the charts.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.

Any song I have to work on longer than a day, I just leave it. It's not gonna work. Everything that's good is really instant.

I was very quiet until I got at the piano, and weekends, lunch breaks, after school, before school, I was just making music.

I'd be smiling if I wasn't so desperate. I'd be patient if I had the time.

A wise system of education will at least teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.

When everyone is poor you don't know you're poor. My father worked so some of the boys thought I was actually rich.

We're not in a fairytale story. This is not a movie. Scriptwriters don't write our fates. We do.

I sat behind Thurman Thomas for my first couple of years, then my first year starting I won the Heisman. After I won the Heisman, that’s when things changed as far as going to the NFL.

Don't play hard to get, play hard to forget.

I think I'm innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures, and, well OK.

Looking the part helps get the chance to fill it. But if you fill the part, it matters not if you look it.

What if I'm not a superhero. What if I'm the bad guy?

I'd rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers.

It's not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it is how you handle what happens to you.