It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
I smile like a flower not only with my lips but with my whole being.
Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.
When love is not accepted move on; when love is not appreciated walk away; hopefully time will teach what real, true love is.
You suppose you are the trouble But you are the cure You suppose that you are the lock on the door But you are the key that opens it It's too bad that you want to be someone else You don't see your own face, your own beauty Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.
If you want money more than anything, you'll be bought and sold. If you have a greed for food, you'll be a loaf of bread. This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.
As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
I'm always interested in hearing how other people read and react to my songs. I hadn't thought of it in just that way. One of the things I love about doing things that are creative is that I feel like it's my right as an artist not to be affected by the reactions of those people that are going to hear my songs. But I also feel like it's the right of the people hearing them to have their own interpretations of what these songs mean. Sometimes people will see things that I don't see.
I think our culture promotes fear and shame.
They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs.
There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech