"I wasn't sure how people were going to take to the stories I was telling and the things I wanted to sing about."

“Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as [Vaclav] Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.”

Source : James W. Sire (2000). “Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling”, p.215, InterVarsity Press

“If e-mail had been around before the telephone was invented, people would have said, 'Hey, forget e-mail! With this new telephone invention I can actually talk to people!'.”

“Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.”

“The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.”

“When I was growing up, you had to conform and do the same thing that everyone else was doing. I would just go home and make music and be able to make myself happy, but I know that's more of a challenge for some people.”

Source : "Charlie Puth's Reason For Being Obsessed With Alicia Keys Will Make You Say, 'Heck Yes'". Interview With Kelsie Gibson, www.popsugar.com. September 7, 2016.

“I've seen men like you in Doris Day films, but I never thought they existed in real life...The men who can't commit, who can't say 'I love you' even when they want to, who start to cough and sputter and change the subject. But here you are. A living, breathing specimen. Incredible.”

“Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.”

“I'm just a skinny kid from Maywood trying to do my best. I never took anything for granted. I never wanted to come off like some kind of big-headed, conceited athlete.”