If you make everything really on the nose so everyone knows exactly what you're talking about, it's often not as strong.

Sold my soul to the devil / for nice penmanship. / Now I write real pretty / but I'm starting to regret it.

I don't believe in the myth of the "self made man". Nobody gets through alone.

I used to be so young, how did I get so old?

You can't just look at the side of something that you want to see. You have to look at the whole round object and understand that there are parts of it that you don't like.

I think that's why art prevails: because it helps people in a fairly intangible, magical way feel more connected to each other.

I think the future and the past are equally hypothetical.

Sometimes I just don't have time to wait for the muse to come, so I've developed things to force the muse to come back.

I'm influenced in a million different ways by a million songs that I've heard and digested.

The idea that things intrinsically were just better is so stupid to me because they never were. It's all relative.

We talk about the past like it's the strangest dream. Then we repeat the things we never dreamed we'd do.

Ah, merciless Love, is there any length to which you cannot force the human heart to go?

I used to think that losing made you more hungry and determined but after my success at the Olympics and the U.S. Open I realise that winning is the biggest motivation.

We've set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up.

The main problem with pacifism is that it doesn’t work in all situations. The main problem with pacifists is that they’re convinced it does.

As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom.

Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.

Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.

They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph.

Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."

Self worth cannot be verified by others. You are worthy because you say it is so. If you depend on others for your value it is other-worth.