Quotes on Things

As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

Everything I do, writing, touring, travelling, it all comes from the punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression - from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go. Make some sense of it.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.

What I really want are students who want to partner with other people, to be part of an organization and to influence people so that they can accomplish things that the organization would not have accomplished otherwise.

If you're a set of guys looking to start a company, think about women you could team up with - they will see things differently and solve problems you didn't even realize you had.

There aren't that many things left that haven't already been done, especially with music. I'm interested in ideas that can shake us all up.

As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.

I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren't random.

I was taught to confront things you can't avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

Necessity is the strongest of things, for it rules everything.

All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.

I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.

I spent one year being very poor at home with my piano, and nobody was calling me, but I had space to think about things on my own and find out exactly what I wanted to do.

Work is what structures adults' lives: it gives us purpose, focus, a set of responsibilities, and an identity. So when people are not participating in the labour market, all sorts of other things often start to go wrong.

I had a period in my life where I decided that I would never be bored again and that, if I had any free time at all, I would make plans, and I would always be doing things. It actually was great for a year or so, but then I lost all of my friends.

If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.

'Bellyache' is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren't real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don't know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.