That was the problem with the 'celibate' word because they don't consider for a moment that you'd rather not be, but you just are. I was never a sexual person.

My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.

Not everybody is absolutely stupid. Why on earth would I be racist, what would I be trying to achieve?

You have to, at least from a distance, look as if you know what you're doing, and I can manage that.

That was the problem with the 'celibate' word because they don't consider for a moment that you'd rather not be, but you just are. I was never a sexual person.

Artists aren't really people. And I'm actually 40 per cent papier mache.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

Age shouldn't affect you. It's just like the size of your shoes - they don't determine how you live your life! You're either marvellous or you're boring, regardless of your age.

I normally live in Los Angeles, if you can call it normal living.

The Smiths was an incredibly personal thing to me. It was like launching your own diary to music.

I do think it's possible to go through life and never fall in love, or find someone who loves you.

I've never intended to be controversial but it's very easy to be controversial in pop music because nobody ever is.

Age gives you a great sense of proportion. You can be very hard on yourself when you're younger but now I just think 'well everybody's absolutely mad and I'm doing quite well'.

That's why I do this music business thing, it's communication with people without having the extreme inconvenience of actually phoning anybody up.

Long hair is an unpardonable offense which should be punishable by death.

The fascinating thing about human beings is that they dont last and everything eventuates and everything is very very brief. And even if you do manage to look reasonably well as you age unfortunately you are attacked at every level by illness and so forth. Its a fact of life.

Why pamper life’s complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?

I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

In a word, if any kind of slavery can be vindicated by the Holy Scriptures, we are already sure our making and holding the Negroes our slaves, as we do, cannot be vindicated by any thing we can find there, but is condemned by the whole of divine revelation.

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

These things don't just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Obedience to the word in humility of mind never confuses.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone; at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

Any political party that includes the word 'democratic' in its name, isn't.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

The word diva to me means doing something supernatural with something natural.

India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples.

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Don't hate the word, playa; hate the dictionary.