I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.

In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.

I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades ago.

I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.

I'd make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.

The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.

There's nothing like doing something wrong to learn how it might be done better.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

A defeat in war is not the greatest of all evils; but when the defeat has been inflicted by enemies who are not worthy of you, then the calamity is doubled.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

But you're like me,” he says. “An outsider. Different. A freak. We're both weird, which is why we get along.

It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue - simplicity is the mark of a master-hand.

A vet! I started laughing weakly and had to sit on the edge of the tub. A vet. Wait till they found out how appropriate that was.

Next time someone tells you 'never,' remember that means 'not for at least one hour.'

All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.

When we're infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness ... it changes what we see. It changes what we remember.

Photographers are always imposing

The only men who aren't in fear of women's reactions are usually men who aren't born or who are dead.