I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.
I don’t remember lighting this cigarette and I don’t remember if I’m here alone or waiting for someone.
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love...
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
How bitter were the Prozac pills of the last few hundred mornings.
Do not be a magician – be magic!
It’s the notion that there is no perfection – that there is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still there is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances.
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
In the broken places, the light shines through.
You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don’t really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
Love is not a victory march.
People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music.