Quotes About Meaning

I always try to give my songs as gifts.

If I had a label, everything would have been easier. But it wouldn't have been the same album, from the cover art to the songs on it.

Songs are all poetry, and they don't make any sense.

I don't know that all the demons have been beaten, but I'm very, very proud of those songs.

I don't think writing open-ended lyrics is necessarily an important part of writing good pop songs.

I'm more than a songwriter. I'm a creative person. Some people you just always see. I won't allow you to see me unless it makes sense. There's a reason to see me.

I've been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don't like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

I'm kind of a perfectionist about my songwriting. If I don't mean it, I don't think it's any good.

Songwriting is a big deal to me.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.

I'm not a religious person, and I'm not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.

Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.

Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

I've always sought to get after something that's foundational in people. That comes through my faith, through my belief in life, through trying to hit something that's true every time. I think that's really where you move people, when you touch on something that's true, that's not based on fluff or based on a moment or a movement.

Art is the skin of the soul.

I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.

People have to have food for their souls.

Working on 'Beyond,' I try to give an explanation to death that's different from the explanation religions have to give. So I made up my own story around all this and how life and death and souls work.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

The word 'living' has so many connotations that I'm almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I'm then downgrading all the other significances of that word.

You see, money isn't everything - I know it sounds corny but I really mean it - success means a lot more.