When you're a songwriter, people wonder about your personal life and the meanings behind the songs, and that can feel pretty invasive, so you become protective about your inner world.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.

I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.

The hopeful part about that is when you do have that help, you will feel better. It still doesn't make this easy. Nothing makes this easy, but you can make better decisions.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know.

Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.

How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.

It is wrong to ask for more than you give freely. In this way, we come to resemble what we hate.

The aim of the taper is to minimise accumulated fatigue and fill up the fuel stores to arrive at the start line fresh.

Intention is everything. If your intention is to find meaning in your life, then your life shall be filled with an enriched sense of purpose and satisfaction.

I just have to practice hard, get better, and go out there and win impressively - that's all it comes down to.

Yesterday, the Senate voted to approve President Clinton's decision to send troops to Bosnia. And they voted to change the name of that mission to "Operation Forget About Whitewater".

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

I know about forgiving people and loving them anyway, even after they hurt you.

Of course smartphones are brilliant inventions, but the nefarious thing about Twitter and other social media is that it starts to fill all the gaps in your day. I quickly become an addict.

What is urgently needed is a bold new move from a consumer economy to a conserver economy in all of the developed countries, and particularly in the United States.

You have to be around people you trust; otherwise you can't do anything - you're afraid, you're paranoid, and you can't do any work.