My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.

The Universe is making music all the time.

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

a foreign affair juxtaposed with a statesideand domestically approved romantic fancy is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing it will only be parlayed into a memory

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one.

I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.

And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you...

I made a wish on a sliver of moonlightA sly grin and a bowl full of stars

Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.

You must have brought the bad weather with youThe sky's the color of leadAll you've left me is a featherOn an unmade bed

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.

You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.

New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.