I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

The idea of licking stamps seemed great fun for me.

I've got a new relationship and I'm trapped in this old life.

Gag me with a spoon!

I like to think of myself as a New Yorker, which is pathetic.

I would think: Stay close to the implants! They must know something because they keep getting asked backstage!

If there's anything more mortifying than being famous at 14, it's being washed up right after.

I made enough money to buy a house. That's crazy, but fame proved ephemeral.

I grew up with too much freedom. You can't define yourself.

I had a friend whose family had dinner together. The mother would tuck you in at night and make breakfast in the morning. They even had a spare bike for a friend. It just seemed so amazing to me.

Not many people know what their parents sound like having sex. It was noisy.

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.

I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

My Dad was so open creatively that I was off in search of black turtleneck bathing suits with long sleeves.

I should just drive around this city and take photos of all the buildings I've been humiliated in.

Every job I've ever gotten has been an accident. All the jobs I actually go after, I don't get.

I didn't have any concept of age or authority. I remember realising, Oh, the world has rules and we don't.

My mother did literally hitchhike barefoot to the country store.

I spent most of my life locked in my bedroom, miserable about my raging acne.

It occurred to me, when I was old enough to make rules of my own, that they should be fair and simple.

How strange, when your father's wearing women's clothes and platform shoes, that a pair of loafers looks incredible.

We had two rules growing up in my house: If you're going to take a shower, do it with whomever you're dating so you don't waste water; and if you buy one for yourself, buy six, because everybody's going to want one.

I peaked early. I was told I'd missed my boat.

I think I have a dark view of the world. I have to make everything funny, otherwise it all seems so sad.

Your own experience keeps taking you towards something. My book adds the hope that it's a better something.

I don't want to lose my name because that's how I know myself. There is a legacy here.

I have a tree man coming to trim the jacaranda in my front garden.

Everyone has flaws. Its a matter of finding the ones you can live with.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?

If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

I guess a good song is a good song is a good song, ya know.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

The band set up in January and just started rehearsing. If there was a song, we'd just rehearse it as a band, and it would get arranged as a band, and it got changed around a lot.

Peace Train is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions of human beings.

I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

Listen kid, take my advice, never hate a song that has sold half a million copies.

There's a lot of rage... you have to express it somehow. If I didn't express it in song, I'd become incredibly violent.

I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

I guess you could write a good song if your heart hadn't been broken, but I don't know of anyone whose heart hasn't been broken.

A song has to become as much a part of you as a tailored suit.

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.