Everyone to me has to pick a subject to talk about in music, if you're going to be a writer. Mine is love, because I know that when a man's making love, the LAST THING HE THINKS ABOUT is war. The last thing he thinks about is how can he blow up a nation. Fleas fuck. Flies, snakes, everybody's into lovemaking. Besides that, it's the most powerful element that men and women possess. Most of us don't know how to use it, but we all possess it.

Maybe dignity is not such a big deal after all. I had it up there with righeousness. I had it up there with something you'd aspire to. But actually the two most important events of your life—being born and dying—are very messy. They're very messy for mother and child. But dignity is a human construct. It's like "cool"; it might be vain. I started to understand those Indian sadhus, and the begging bowl of the Hindu priests, and people who are like, "Let's get dignity out of the way." Maybe humility is the eye of the needle that we all have to pass through.

You are what you settle for. You're ONLY as much as you settle for. If they settle for being somebody's dishwasher, that's their own fucking problem. If you don't settle for that and you keep fighting, you'll end up anything you want to be. How can they attack me? I'm just doing what I want to and what feels right and not settling for shit. How can they be mad at that?

I think the idea of sort of confronting this always-present idea that people around you are going to die or that you're going to die. I think it makes living better, it really does. I hate this notion that I would ever forget how temporary this whole thing is. Life is worth celebrating and worth living even though we're all headed to the same hole at the end of the day. Without sort of coming to terms with it, you're not coming to terms with some of the joys of life at the same time.

People generally express more in between their sentences, when they're not speaking. Words generally are a disguise of who someone is or what they're feeling. Sometimes words are too complicated and they over-intellectualize moments. They're red herrings.

The whole thing about perfectionism is that perfectionism is very dangerous. Because if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, then you never do anything. Because doing anything… It's actually kind of tragic, because you sacrifice how gorgeous it is in your head for what it really is.

In my life now I have three children, and I think I'm happy when I'm with them and they're okay. When I see them enjoying each other in front of me, and then they let me enjoy them in turn, that brings a feeling which I would say is happiness. Now I don't know why. I mean, I do know why on the surface, because they're my kids. But it is a certain thing that happens and I'm like, RIGHT NOW. RIGHT NOW. THIS IS IT. But there are moments when something else creeps in there, and I'm not conscious of the love; I'm conscious of something else, which happens to be my own childhood. So all of a sudden they begin to reflect something other than what I hoped my childhood would be. Having a kid always takes you back to being a kid somehow. They really are showing me a child I might not have had in some way. But if something else creeps in, it becomes a different kind of reflection, of your shortcomings, of your inadequacies, your incapabilities, your powerlessness, and on and on and on, which wakens up a whole other thing. That's what I mean about happiness. Does that mean it ended? That gets so discouraging to me. What is this thing?

Somebody asked me one time how I feel about being called a genius, if I feel I need to live up to something. It ain't that kind of ballgame. I feel that whatever people say about me and call me… All the little adjectives and different things people have put on me, I had nothing to do with that. I never said I was a genius. I never said I was a cornerstone. I never said I was a legend in my own time. You never heard me say nothing like that. What I've got to live up to is being myself. If I do that, the rest will take care of itself.