I guess my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did, was the biggest record that I'll ever have.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

Everywhere I go, there are all these Big Star freaks, and they’re nice little guys who are usually in college, and they’re kind of lonely and misunderstood, learning to play guitar.

Fame has a lot of baggage to carry around. I wouldn't want to be like Bruce Springsteen. I don't need that much money and wouldn't want to have 20 bodyguards following me.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.

The children almost broken by the world become the adults most likely to change it.

Shoo. Away with you. It's my fault for expecting the extraordinary from the ordinary.

The best players want to play in the best competition.

Reinforce what you want to see repeated.What gets rewarded gets done.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

If I am happy inside, then I live in paradise no matter where my residence is.

I always wanted to be a singer, but none of my friends thought I could sing.

I've never had an abortion. And I don't know if I would. But, it doesn't mean that I wouldn't fight to the death for women to make their own choices for their own human bodies.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.