We cannot let the right wing roll back more than thirty years of social progress.

I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia.

Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice.

I was a personality before I became a person - I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven.

You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.

The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country.

I don't like the word 'superstar'. It has ridiculous implications. These words - star, stupor, superstar, stupid star - they're misleading. It's a myth.

Oh God, don't envy me, I have my own pains.

When they tried me out as a host on TV, I found that I just couldn't be that gregarious person. I was stranger than that.

Stay true to yourself. People respond to authenticity.

Doubt can motivate you, so don't be afraid of it. Confidence and doubt are at two ends of the scale, and you need both. They balance each other out.

Leadership is not about me, it's about our country.

Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it.

Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles and you have to change it.

It feels like I'm starting to come into my own in terms of where I want to go artistically, toward more complicated, interesting characters.

I find that musically, looking back, I have learned much more from those relationships, people I have bumped into that I have admired, that's the way I feel musically I have learned most in life.

A committee of three can accomplish much if two don't show up.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion - except for the sect that can win political power.

I hadn't known anything else, other than being an artist, and I needed to be a person for a while, really get to know myself without that whole thing [of selling music] surrounding me.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.