"Songwriting is a craft. Writing good songs on a a consistent basis doesn not happen spontaneously. In fact, most of our best songwriters learned to write good songs by writing a lot of not so good ones. Education matters in songwriting, just as it matters for physicists, chemists, doctors, lawyers and MBAs. Education lays the foundataion on which to build experience."

“Paper money is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.”

“Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.”

“I'd never have written the big books in London.”

“Naked I came, naked I leave the scene”

“I was the fastest typist in my school, and I had an obsession with spelling and memorizing.”

Source : "When I Was 17: Shelley Hennig". Interview with Emily Laurence, www.seventeen.com. April 19, 2012.

“Usually based on an economic agenda, white working-class voters don't buy into this whole biology-chemistry-abortion-gender agenda as much as they want more take-home pay. They want affordability.”

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

Source : "Dreyfus : His Life and Letters‎" edited by Pierre Dreyfus, (p. 175), 1937.

“And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.”

Source : Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.