My father, good or bad, mistakes or no, had a direct line from his heart to the music to the people, to the audience. He played with logic and his own inner truth.

Of course there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings

Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition.

Don't tell me how talented you are. Tell me how hard you work.

Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.

To be alive, to able to see, to walk...it's all a miracle. I have adapted the technique of living life from miracle to miracle.

What good are vitamins? Eat a lobster, eat a pound of caviar - live! If you are in love with a beautiful blonde with an empty face and no brains at all, don't be afraid. Marry her! Live!

You cannot play the piano well unless you are singing within you.

Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me; music is me. I feel what people get out of me is this outlook on life, which comes out in my music. My music is the last expression of all that.

I'm a free person; I feel terribly free. They could put me in chains and I still would be free because my thoughts would be mine - and that's all I want to have.

We only begin to live life when we learn to accept it on its own terms.

What must I say, that you don’t know on your own?

The feeling of 'turning into your dad' is nothing compared to the realisation that your son is turning into you.

The only thing worst than being hurt is everyone knowing that yoou're hurt.

Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

I like making songs up. Whether or not they're great songs or good songs, whatever. It's something I've always done, and I definitely feel like I've gotten better at it.

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.

I argued constantly with my father [Pablo Escobar] because I never liked all the violence that he created.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

As long as they are well-intentioned, mistakes are not a matter for shame but for learning