I kind of like polishing the songs that I'm working on. I'm really working hard on some specific songs.

I make a living from storytelling - if you're a public person and you sing songs about getting married to get a visa, and you are actually doing that, you're gonna end up in trouble.

I would cut off my right arm to be someone's lover.

What's broken can always be fixed What's fixed will always be broken

You don't get over a broken heart/ You just learn to carry it gracefully.

I would never kiss anyone/ Who doesn't burn me like the sun.

I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year.

I really think I need to find a home. I don't know if that includes a girlfriend or not, but first I need to find a home, definitely.

I hate when songwriters refer to their songs as babies.

I must admit that it seems like my mind really reconstructs some things, and in a very - I just know that it seems like some things are not as I remembered them when I do some investigation.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

Writers are the ink of society

What is it like to be so free - so trapped, but so free? What kind of bird sings only when caught? What kind of slave outshines and rises above her master?

Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person.

If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can't be breakthroughs.

It is historical continuity that maintains most assumptions, not repeated assessment of their validity.

If you do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. If what you are doing is not working, do something else.

I would never scream at my kids, never raise my voice. But as they often tell me, they were so well behaved that screaming was not necessary.

Many a happiness in life, a many a disaster, is due to chance alone; but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.

Any ideas of “other” are complicated, and otherness is relative to personal ideas of “normal.”

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.