"From the beginning, I imagined I would have a long work life."

"I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition."

"I didn't know if it would be a success-ful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter."

"I always wanted my music to influence the life you were living emotionally - with your family, your lover, your wife, and, at a certain point, with your children."

"I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along."

"In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it."

"In the early years, I found a voice that was my voice and also partly my father's voice. But isn't that what you always do? Why do kids at 5 years old go into the closet and put their daddy's shoes on? Hey, my kids do it."

"I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't."

"Basically, I was pretty ostracized in my hometown. Me and a few other guys were the town freaks- and there were many occasions when we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves."

"When I first started in rock, I had a big guy's audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid '80s."

"Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody's different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous."

"No, I always felt that amongst my core fans- because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mid '80s that was sort of a bump on the scale- they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work."

"Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music."

"The only thing I can say about having this type of success is that you can get yourself in trouble because basically the world is set open for you. People will say yes to anything you ask, so it's basically down to you and what you want or need."

"In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention."

"To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is."

"The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard."

"The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade."

"Purity is the power to contemplate defilement."

"Pain is the root of knowledge"

"The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting."

"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice."

"There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies."

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life"

"Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached."

"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it."

"There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul."

"Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just."

"Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?"

"In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself -- only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie."

"The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."

"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."

"I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her."

"Every perfect life is a parable invented by God."

"To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile."

"The most important part of teaching; to teach what it is to know."

"In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention."

"We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful."

"Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge."

"Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty."

"In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs."

"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too."

"One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights."

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."

"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams."

"Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."

"It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures."

"The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."

"With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed."

"To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life."