When I'm making my own record, it's real work for me.

There's only two things. There's life, and there's death.

I can't really sit around and talk with people who believe that the Bible is the way it happened, because that's man-made. I'm a writer, too; that's how I look at the Bible. Like, 'I could've written a better version than that,' you know? At least a more interesting one, and then maybe more people would go to church. I could definitely do a revamp.

I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you're not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you.

I found it easier to make up songs than to learn other people's songs.

The Songwriters Hall of fame, that's the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.

I started out in the folk music world only because of the way my songs were written and performed, with just an acoustic guitar, but I always related to the rock n' roll lifestyle.

I was kind of shy as a lad, and a lot of things that made me laugh, I found, did not make other people laugh.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.

Don't be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.

Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don't mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That's not power. That's just corruption.

There's a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.

Men and women aren't the same. And they won't be the same. That doesn't mean that they can't be treated fairly.

We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.

The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don't like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they're 95 percent dead wood.

When you start to realise how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.

It's very hard to find your own words - and you don't actually exist until you have your own words.

If you don't stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.

It's not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It's inappropriate.

All things considered, there's nobody better for children than parents.

I'm always surprised when people respond positively to what I am saying, given its seriousnessness and strange nature.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

Free speech is not just another value. It's the foundation of Western civilization.

I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that's true to some degree.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.

I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

Don't lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

One of the things I've told men over and over and over and over is if you're being rejected by all the women that you approach, it's not the women!

It's a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they're almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

The masculine spirit is under assault. It's obvious.

Power is competence.

You can say, 'Well, isn't it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine' - well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter, because that is how it's represented. It's been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible. This is underneath everything.

That's another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it's as if things were coming together in my mind. It's like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it's it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Kathleen Wynne and her band of radical-left cronies think they have a handle on what constitutes human identity and also what should constitute human morality. And I think that that's being pushed in a manner in schools that's completely reprehensible. It's not education, in my estimation. It's a form of indoctrination.

I don't really regard myself as a political figure.

You can't go backward in life.

If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I'll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don't know exactly what's going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what's inside of them without being part of them.

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.