At the top of the cycle you write policies for everybody, no matter how bad, and at the bottom you cancel everybody, no matter how good. It's a manic-depressive cycle.

At the top of the cycle you write policies for everybody, no matter how bad, and at the bottom you cancel everybody, no matter how good. It's a manic-depressive cycle.

When you get ready to vote, make sure you know what you are doing.

You who choose to lead must follow. But if you fall, you fall alone.

Being in a floodplain is like sitting down in a bathtub.

I feel I've got 10 books in me.

In wickedness of pride is lost the light to understand how little grace is earned and how much given.

A song doesn't happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.

I got really, really sick with a spinal infection that put me in a hospital for a couple of months, and it was touch and go. I had my guitar with me, and as soon as I got well enough to play, there was nothing else to do in that hospital. The nurses would come in and request songs.

I tend to write things and don't go the next step and try to get it published. I don't want to do book signings and stuff.

I walk away from writing what I consider to be a good song - with a good character, a good story in it - with all I'm gonna really get out of that song. My greatest pleasure is to create it, not to record it, not to hear anyone else play it, though that can be nice too.

I'm not good at being lionized, and when I'm in 'Grateful Dead'-type situations, that happens.

If you can even manage to tell exactly what a song is about, all you do is put that song in a box forever, and it loses its evocative power.

When I got out of the hospital, it was one of those classic things - you're looking death in the eye, and it changes you. I thought, I ought to go back on the road.

Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.

Whatever I own is temporary, since we're only here for a short period of time. It's what we do and produce, it's our actions that will last forever. That's real value.

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

The unsaid message of that endless rack of juniors' pushup bras? No matter what size you are, it still isn't good enough.

I'm very picky and I'm in a situation where it's a big crossover.

I'm not going to run for political office.

There's not a lot of positive role models of women in newspapers and magazines. I think it puts pressure on girls. They think that the image put out, it's the way you have to look.

This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president.

When you get discouraged or depressed try changing your attitude from negative to positive and see how life can change for you.

In general, the human race is still a young organism.

I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing.

Grief is like a moving river, so that's what I mean by it's always changing. It's a strange thing to say because I'm at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It's just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone.

I used to be scared of uncertainty; now I get a high out of it.

I took a cabbie to taxi court once. Years ago, this guy didn't want to take me to Brooklyn. Just refused. I explained that I would absolutely take him to Taxi Court because, see, I'm an actor and have pretty much nothing but free time.

Friends are Gods way of taking care of us.

My mom and I had the same vision, and we want the same things. We would always make a goal list every year.

Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.

Creative people who have made their seemingly most self-indulgent artistic whims into a career.

You're too busy writing the next book to worry about Googling yourself all the time.

There is a company in Barcelona called Headless, and I was a huge fan. I love their style. I had been trying to work with them for years. 'A Monster Calls' was the perfect project to work on with them.

When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

It's a piece of property that, if you're going to have a development out here, you need to have a golf course because you need to take care of the effluent water being created by the development.

I couldn't have ever married an actor. They have a childishness carried into an age when maturity should have set in.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.