There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

A place of freedom is the best place to have the most creativity.

Many hedge fund managers have become billionaires; perhaps this - plus their reputations as the smartest guys in the room - is why they have captured the investing public's imagination.

I want to live with that sense with the music I make, with the art I make, with the way I love my kids, with the way I am a father and a husband and a friend and a follower of Christ, I want to live with reckless abandonment to the truth of the Gospel.

I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.