The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn’t love me anymore, and it’s not the end of the world.

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best.

For a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it’s not. Now the most important thing about me is that I’m old.

Healing yourself is connected with healing others.

I mean, if the relationship can’t survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?

It’s much more interesting to try and understand what binds two people together. Why we stay with each other is much more of a mystery than why we don’t.

Everyone’s allowed to be in love with the wrong person at some point. In fact, it’s a mistake not to be.

When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. it’s because a little piece gets lost — the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.

I’ve always believed that if you don’t stay moving, they will throw dirt on you.

It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart do not know how to laugh either.

Hearts live by being wounded.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It’s a journey of recovery. It’s a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It’s already there.

Bad days call for foods that are bad for your butt.

What’s broken is broken — and I’d rather remember it as it was than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

I love to shop after a bad relationship. I don’t know. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes I see a really great outfit, I’ll break up with someone on purpose.

Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.

Don’t dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer.

Some of us think that holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it’s letting go.

Recovery is something that you have to work on every single day and it’s something that it doesn’t get a day off.

One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

Don’t allow someone not worth it to have the power to occupy your thoughts. If they don’t find you worth the effort or the time, why should you waste yours?

Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with.

What we wait around a lifetime for with one person, we can find in a moment with someone else.

Only time can heal his heart, just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself.

The dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

If you choose to put political expediency and politics ahead of the men and women on the ground, for that, you'll have to answer to yourself. I find it morally reprehensible.

When I'm in a bad mood, I don't listen.

If you want to feel more comfortable and happy work on making the people around you more comfortable and happy.

The most important advice I can offer is that writing is a craft that you can learn by practicing. If you keep writing, you will improve.

We get caught up in all the stress - 'Got to do this, is this the right thing for me to do?' - but what about the thing you want to do? That's what'll keep you young. It's empowering, not becoming a prisoner of some other person's idea of what you should be.

I like something simple and traditional, like dinner and a movie. The best way to get to know someone is to have a conversation over dinner. And steak houses have a nice atmosphere - the lights are dim, and they usually have a band playing.

XTC is my favorite band; I'm a huge Neil Young fan, Jayhawks, all that type of stuff. I like Death Cab for Cutie, also Ryan Adams. I try to impress my children: 'Have you listened to such-and-such?' They're not impressed.

I'm a hard guy to live with. I'm like a caged animal. I'm up all night walking around the living room. It's hard for me to come down from what I do.

Yes is what I like doing more than anything else. Somewhere along the way, as people came and went, it fell to me to kind of keep it going and oversee the spirit of the enterprise, as it were.

I went to art high school and thought I'd be a painter. Unfortunately I didn't finish high school, but that's always been part of my work.

In my creative life, David Bowie is definitely an enormous influence on me, being one of rock's greatest shapeshifters.

Night is the mother of counsels.

Dynamism is a function of change.

I think it's being thrown at the wolves, we call it in our business.

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

When you write an album and you're writing about relationships, the stuff that I've been through in my relationships, 99 percent of it is really good, but it's that one percent that always inspires you to write a song.

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.

To supply people for ages in camps makes no sense... you have to rebuild that cabana that they rent out to tourists on the weekend. They need help getting their fields repaired and their boats repaired.