It took a lot of time and practice for me to realise that there's no point trying to be something you're not.

If I don't have an outlet in which to express myself...throug h songwriting or other mediums...I get a bit jittery.

A friend is a friend forever And a good one will never leave, never

I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs.

Oh! To not need cognitive justification for every single thing. Wouldn't that be a life?

I was an incredibly misanthrope. I couldn't relate to people my age, and I'm not sure why, as I wasn't particularly smart or interesting

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

Womanhood is something you don't consider until it hits you.

Age is relative. Experience is relative. And I think often intensity is confused with maturity.

No one starts playing my kind of music to make a fortune. But I do want to keep doing what I do and I do want to continue selling records. And I would, eventually, quite like some money.

I don't need to sell tons of records, but I want longevity. I want to make music for the rest of my life.

Realize in life that you will have your ups and downs. You can't have those wonderful up moments without the downs. If everything stayed the same all the time, that would be depressing.

Words have less substance than air. Don't tell me about your zealous dreams, your firm convictions, your profound love―show me.

What is living? Forging memories. What is dying? Forgetting them.I never die.

Hunger of the heart is much stronger than hunger for food.

We have only this moment sparkling like a star in our hand ... and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late.

The gravest question any of us face is whether we do or do not love the Lord.

This is our world. Aye, there's more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there's all this joy, Kit. There's all this lovely, lovely light.

You can speed up your life if you want to - that's easy. Winding down is what's hard.

I have this really morbid, awesome love for the movie Black Swan.

So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.