I've never, ever in my life enjoyed playing live the way I am now.

I didn't want my last chapter to be the guy who sits at the piano and sings love songs.

The only thing that's a little tricky about it is sometimes people assume that if it's a new song, it's a reflection of what you're feeling or going through now.

I really didn't have any plans to record prior to doing My Own Best Enemy.

My joke, which isn't really a joke, is that there will be one of two tours: the tour for the album that does well, or the tour for the album that stiffs.

I think I do better when things are a little tougher.

I've never, ever in my life enjoyed playing live the way I am now.

I love when people get songs wrong. I love when people take something from a song that's totally not what I intended!

I understand that, but this disc shows the type of music that I've always liked and wanted to make.

In the past, there has always been so much pressure about carrying a show and promoting a record.

So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy.

And to any new fans we made along the way, I say... welcome to our party. It's just starting to get going.

I've never written a song that I thought was a hit.

It never ceases to amaze me that I get to do this for a living.

When things are too easy I lose interest in them so I find ways to complicate them to get myself interested.

One time Robert Plant was set to check into the same room after I checked out, so I removed every light bulb and ordered up a bunch of stinky cheese and put it under the mattress.

I fell off stage and bruised some ribs. The worst part was that the audience didn't realize I was gone.

People take songs so literally.

I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about.

I think really what I'm saying is that I thrive on adversity.

But I'm just having fun playing and giving Botox injections to the older songs.

But once you have some success in one style, the business wants to lock you in that vein forever.

I've always loved groups like U2 and Coldplay.

I can't wait to front my band with these new songs and play for fans, but I've decided to keep my day job too.

As a songwriter, there's nothing better than winning Song Of The Year. But I couldn't really celebrate, because it wasn't right. Luther wasn't standing next to me, to receive the award.

I have complete freedom, and there's no way to get pigeonholed or bored. What could be better than that?

I'm now so keenly aware that I have everything to prove and nothing to lose.

I don't think I've ever laid out a batch of songs that pick myself apart the way that these do.

It's funny; Luther and I have written many songs together, but we've never written songs in the same room.

Doing my own album provided me the opportunity to say whatever I wanted.

But more importantly, I think he remembered how very close I was with my own dad, who had died in 1997.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.