I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.

'Sunrise Sunset' is about trying to get to a place where life is simple and not letting the stress and happenings in the world get in the way of your happiness.

Benny Cassette

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Susan Sontag

Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind.

Robertson Davies

There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.

Woodrow Wilson

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A life without obstacles or trials is a life without growth.

Lamar Thompson

It is from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the mind, that mathematical speculations derive some of the most considerable advantages; because there is nothing to interest the imagination; because the judgment sits free and unbiased to examine the point. All proportions, every arrangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, because the same truths result to it from all; from greater from lesser, from equality and inequality.

Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and

The songs keep on writing themselves, and I really love them. It's as close as I get to a religion.

Kristin Hersh

There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.

Gerard Way

Right now I'm pretty single... My career is my boyfriend.

Christina Aguilera

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Nobody was listening when I learned how to play music. But there's something about being on stage, talking to the audience, looking at them and smiling, that's always been difficult for me. I'm a lot more comfortable now, but there are still moments of awkwardness.

Norah Jones