Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It's uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.

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.

A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Creativity is not result, it is a process!

What we discover is it was not the waves or the birds or the wind that were standing out and being separate from existence; it was we who were standing out and being separate from existence.

Survival is my primary instinct...it's out of my control. It's stronger than me. It's an outside force, a voice that says 'do this for your life or it will devour you.'

Spiritual infirmities such as tepidity are caused, not only by chills but also by fevers, that is, by excessive zeal.

Teaching has given me a community that cares about poetry, and I'm grateful for that.

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.

December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory.

Always keep the mind cheerful. Everyone will die once. Cowards suffer the pangs of death again and again, solely due to the fear in their own minds.