If your standards are low, you're going to stop pretty early on in the process.

Telling what you feel, trying to talk about what's important to you, does not make you weaker.

But I can't confront the doubts I have. I can't admit that maybe the past was bad, and so, for the sake of momentum I'm condemning the future to death so it can match the past.

I don't consider myself a great writer, but I would like to think that I can at least proof- read.

It's funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can't even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.

It really doesn't matter to me what people say about me anymore.

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

When things are really great, it just means everything's in it's place.

I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.

Better take the keys and drive forever. Staying won't put these futures back together. All the perfect drugs and superheroes wouldn't be enough to bring me back to zero.

If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

A new age is approaching, and its advent might make us pray to go back to the days of the trenches. Once the Worldwaker goes off, we will never be able to sleep again.

Sometimes I'm a black. Not everyone realizes blackness has to be conferred upon you again and again. It's like getting your nails done. Or being pantsed. People assume I'm cool.

there is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.

I can remember standing in a W.P.A. line with a gunny sack, and I remember having to buy chocolate milk instead of white because it was one cent cheaper.

God is not hostile to sinners, but only to unbelievers.

I began to understand that all Texas is an eternal synthesis of past and present, superimposed one upon the other. It produces a feeling of being in two places at once.

One very fundamental thing has not changed and I realized that it will never change... is that I really need to go home and practice.

Whatever happens, happens to you by you, through you; you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive.