What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.
Life is never a straight line - it's peaks and valleys. Why would you want to be the same person every day of your life?
It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.
We all have two lives. The one we are given and the one we create.
Carry with you maps and string, flashlights, friends who make you sing, and stars to help you find your place, music, hope, and amazing grace.
I've never. . . when I was having songs on the airwaves, and that sort of thing, I never felt a sense of pressure anywhere except from myself, to do things the way I wanted to do them; to feel authentic; to feel like I was presenting my true self to the world.
I think topical songwriting is a real gift, and it's hard not to be pedantic and show up with the sledgehammer message.
Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.
The sole purpose of life is to gain merit for life in eternity.
There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. . . But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
I never go black tie. I never grew up wearing ties or bow ties or anything.