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

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.

What you don't want to do - if you're concerned about poverty, if you're concerned about providing opportunity - you don't want to rip the bottom rung of the ladder of opportunity away from people.

The Nashville Network, that's all I would watch as a kid.

For 'The Theory of Everything,' I was quite low down on a list of actors for the role, and I got the opportunity as a consequence of people saying no to it. So I have been very, very lucky.

In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying.

Humor is rare in science fiction... there's so little of it that it automatically reminds you of other heroes with that acerbic humor when you find it.

I had a job when I was 16 at a gas fitter, which was a bit like a pipe fitter.

What I'm trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and frankly, I would never want to see that repeated.

Just do what you do best.

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

Parents should watch what their children watch and not use TV as a babysitter. If a show is objectionable they should turn it OFF. They should write the president of the network and tell him they are never going to watch that program again and why.

For new bands, I think a major label is the safest place to be. Independent labels are the ones getting away with murder. A lot of them are hobbyists who rip-off young bands, taking advantage of people who would never get signed to a major.

I didn't grow up around wild horses, no. But I've appreciated their beauty and their power ever since I can remember.

Be at peace with your own soul, then heaven and earth will be at peace with you.

As an actor, secrets and obstacles fuel the character.

One-eyed Reuben 'Rooster' Cogburn is the role that finally delivered John Wayne his Oscar.

So I just came out here to Los Angeles with a bunch of buddies I had gone to film school with. You know, for better or worse, we just tried to slug it out here.

That's quite a difficult thing in life, to be who you are. And when you are doing interviews, you kind of feel this need to say something interesting.

None of the actor methods ever discussed what it would be like to play a character on film for over a decade, and what it must be like to return to a character and imagine the time off-screen, which is interesting. There's something as an actor that I enjoy about evolving characters.

Fame is easy to acquire; impact is much more difficult.

I've never formally trained in acting, so I'm very instinctual and visceral with decisions.

I taught a master class in film in France, and that was a great experience because I got a chance to study the French film culture and the French film history, so to add... just to expand myself just personally and professionally was really helpful.

I'm really into nutrition from the inside out.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

I would like to be remembered as a guy who had a set of priorities, and was willing to live by those priorities. In terms of accomplishments, my biggest accomplishment is that I kept the country safe amidst a real danger.