No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.
A is for Answering all your prayers, N is for kNowing that your loverman’s going to be the answer...
The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.
Brother, be a brother, fill this tiny cup of mine. And please, sir, make it whiskey: I have no head for wine!
Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it.
After a while, you just don’t do things you don’t wanna do – that’s the great freedom you get, the older you get. You learn what to do and what not to do, and what will be a waste of time and what won’t be a waste of time.
I’m a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can’t help but see the world in a certain kind of way.
I don’t think Hollywood makes many good films anymore. How many directors can you really trust to have an artistic vision, not a corporate vision or a watered-down communal one?
I’ve spent my life butting my head against other people’s lack of imagination.
I am not interested in anything that doesn’t have a genuine heart to it. You’ve got to have soul in the hole. If that isn’t there, I don’t see the point.
I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don’t like to get my knees dirty. I don’t have a garden.
My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I’m quite like that in real life as well.
You can’t trust an artist that just makes good records.
All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent until you do it.
I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.
Most screen violence is tedious.
Look, when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say.
Most of the time, feelings just seem to get in the way. They’re a luxury for the idle, a bourgeois concept. Feelings are overrated.
Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That’s terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.
Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.