Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

I guess my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did, was the biggest record that I'll ever have.

Everywhere I go, there are all these Big Star freaks, and they’re nice little guys who are usually in college, and they’re kind of lonely and misunderstood, learning to play guitar.

Fame has a lot of baggage to carry around. I wouldn't want to be like Bruce Springsteen. I don't need that much money and wouldn't want to have 20 bodyguards following me.

There is nothing unpremeditated, nothing neglected by God. His unsleeping eye beholds all things.

Second, there are so many magical places in books that you cant go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.

I really like clever men who challenge you.

Each person's life – each lifeform, in fact – represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself.

There are too many books. The books are terrible. And this is because you have been taught to have self-esteem.

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple

It's the sum of many parts which grow to be something great.

I like magazines. I love to look at a magazine. But the magazines have got to get better. Everything pushes someone else to get better. So the Internet pushes the magazines.

A woman not only takes her identity and individuality for granted, but knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others, and that the meaning of life is love.

Love resembles a tree: it bends under its own weight, deeply rooted in our being and sometimes turns green in the ruins of a heart.