When you make a great record, it's around forever.

When you make a great record, it's around forever.

We don't know what we're doing. We don't have a plan. We don't sit down and calculate it.

When you first start doing it, being on tour is inspiring, because you've never been anywhere.

I want to make 20, 30, 50 studio records.

I get sick when I think about someone going to iTunes and downloading two songs off our album. It's not meant to be listened to that way.

I would read fishing reports on the road and then it just occurred to me: I should go to sea school and get my captain's license, see if I can get paid to be out here every day.

If you can find one thing in your life that can keep you in the moment, you're totally lucky.

If you write 50 songs, you're bound to write at least a dozen good ones.

It's quantity, not quality.

On tour, I'll get up at 5 p.m. and go to bed at 8 in the morning. With fishing, it's the exact opposite. Fishing is the only healthy thing I do. Touring is such a grind; it's the opposite of healthy.

The juxtaposition between fishing and touring couldn't be greater.

When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.

Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.

My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far.

Acting is what I love. I love being the chameleon, and you can't do that if you have just one physical type.

I started working out with a trainer and I immediately saw results.

The worst part of success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.

Most African women are taught to endure abusive marriages. They say endurance means a good wife but most women endure abusive relationship because they are not empowered economically; they depend on their husbands.

I wish I didn't have to perform 'Iron Man' every night.

I have a trophy case that contains all the action figures ever made of me. It also has items I've stolen from my movies, like three guns and holsters from 'Serenity'.

These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It's hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - there's something romantic about it.

Licences to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child.

Success is the American Dream. And that success is not something to be ashamed of, or to demonize.

Journaling is something that I've always tried to get into.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

Just the idea that no matter what Thor is up to he comes back to Earth is something special.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

First, kids should be involved in the production of their own food. They have to get their hands in the dirt, they have to grow things. They also have to become sensually stimulated, and the way to begin is with a bakery.

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created.

I can go to any restaurant without a reservation, but while I'm there, everyone's gonna be staring.

I like the lasso of truth. There is something so beautiful about the fact that people have to tell the truth when they have the lasso around them. And it's not too violent.

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

Everyone was thinking it was going to be a bust. I felt redeemed.

Before you are wise after you are wise. In between you are otherwise.