If something bothers me, it bothers me for a long time until I find a way to work it out. Music provided me with a means of working things out.

Most of the music you hear on the radio today is developed for making money. It doesn't feel true or honest. You can feel it in the music.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

And I've been walking 'round with memories way too long.

I honestly don't listen to a lot of music - I spend so much time working at my own music.

I was mainly influenced by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and others like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash.

We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

This is how it has been since time began: If you want to make something really worthwhile and true, then you have to suffer for it.

I've always been aware of having feelings that were pretty intense at times. I imagine most people have had that, or they wouldn't be human.

I don't describe myself as a Christian or religious, but I like to think that how I live my life is honest.

A Sufi will say – Everything is beautiful, even the dirt that clings beneath my feet.

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.

You are not a note in a symphony

I never deny a true experience in one shot.

I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.

Talent is long patience.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

It doesn't feel good when you're put down, and especially for no uncertain reason.

Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.

God's mills grind slow, But they grind woe.