For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn't mean you're fantastic.

All my songs are where I am.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

My life isn't necessarily more important than anyone else's: I'm just better in talking about it.

But what you realise after you've been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don't have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

When so much money is involved in these movies, someone somewhere is going to try to screw you.

If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.

There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process.

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn't mean you're fantastic.

Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.

I can't pretend to be objective when it comes to service or sacrifice.

Enormous slaughter may have been acceptable in previous centuries. It simply isnt acceptable anymore.

To aim at the best and to remain essentially ourselves is one and the same thing.

The herbalist I met a few times - it was great - she gave me literature about the different processes that an herbalist would do to make medicines from certain herbs and things.

Everyone has his faults which he continually repeats: neither fear nor shame can cure them.

I've been acting a long time. I've been a member of SAG since 1982.

There are two ways of spreading light - to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Exercise is a dirty word. Every time I hear it I wash my mouth out with chocolate.

Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol.

As an actor, a role can be a great excuse not to be in shape. I mean, you wouldn't want to see the Dude with a six-pack, so you eat that Haagen-Dazs. My weight goes up and down.

The Emergency Banking Act reached back in time to amend the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had originally been intended to criminalize economic intercourse between American citizens and declared enemies of the United States.

After all, all knowledge simply means self knowledge.

We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts. They're used quite often, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid living, to avoid doing the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with a person next to us. That's why we can all be in a room on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another.

Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

I was a bratty little sister. I was the youngest of three, and I often felt as though I didn't fit in.

I think it would be over-exaggeration to think that there are millions of viruses ready to jump on us and bring us back to the 14th century. That would be looking over a ledge that isn't there.

Americans, who make more of marrying for love than any other people, also break up more of their marriages, but the figure reflects not so much the failure of love as the determination of people not to live without it.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

No one is rich whose expenditures exceed his means, and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings.

Hey, I'm like the Wayne Gretsky of the entertainment biz - I have other people do my dirty work while I skate around and get to be a nice guy. What can I say? I'm a coward.

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Most successful politicians don't let the job swamp their lives.