That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them.

The business today is completely different and it's very producer driven, so that a songwriter needs to have producing chops, be a singer, songwriter, or find a singer to develop.

Sharing a triumph with someone you love is an incredible high.

My nature is to be linear, and when I'm not, I feel really proud of myself.

You made a lot of mistakes, and you wrote a lot of crap. But it was all part of the learning process.

We wrote what sounded good to us and hoped it would find a home.

That's what it is every time you walk into the room to write with someone new. It's like, oh god I have to take my clothes off 'my creative clothes' and let them see all of my flaws.

You just have to believe in yourself when you've got something, and just keep pounding on the door, because if you pound long enough, somebody is going to open it.

I wanted to write for Broadway.

We have gone through some difficult times like everyone else and perhaps our working together and respecting each other's abilities, in addition to that little thing called love, helped us survive.

She could only write with him at night and she was wasting her days just sitting around. So he thought I could write with her during the day. And that was Carole King.

Doing something positive will help turn your mood around. When you smile, your body relaxes. When you experience human touch and interaction, it eases tension in your body.

Today is yesterday's pupil.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.

I believe in America, and I still do.

Even an ugly, abject photograph bears the recording of its making... my goal [is] to create dense objects, works in which many lines of thought converge.

The mouthier I got, the more I'd be celebrated.

The quality of life decreases with heightened security.

Not every man was sorry when he hurt a woman.

Love runs away from those chasing her, and those who run away, she throws herself on his neck.