Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few.

It's easier to write songs when you're single.

So few people are truly themselves when they're in the spotlight.

I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.

Just because I'm talking about something that might have been a sad or painful situation doesn't mean that I'm sad or tortured 24 hours a day any more than anybody else is.

People let their own hang-ups become the obstacles between them and personal happiness.

I think we start suffering as soon as we come out of the womb. I think that people tend to stereotype. When they think of suffering, they think of abuse - physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, that kind of thing. There's different levels of suffering. I don't think that it has to do with how much money you have - if you were raised in the ghetto or the Hamptons. For me it's more about perception: self-perception and how you perceive the world.