I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.

Oh, I'm terrible at travel.

I actually feel I'm in a much better place than I've ever been because I'm thankful people still love the songs that I've written, and they seem to like me. And they come to the shows in droves, and they get all excited, and I can still hit all the notes, and I don't look terrible.

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA's Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

It makes me sad that corporations and media and Hollywood conspire to make people feel terrible about their bodies from the second they wake up, so I sort of try to subversively undercut that.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

I think it's a terrible thing to write and not enjoy it. It's a sad thing. But of course a lot of people do work because they need to eat. And we all need to eat, but that's not the only reason to work. You couldn't have paid me not to write.

'Terrible' is not a word I would use in shooting romantic scenes with Scott Speedman.

When I watch a romantic comedy, I feel like they're selling something that doesn't exist. Two beautiful, but extremely unpleasant, people are terrible to each other for an hour, accidentally kiss, then decide to like each other during an extremely vague montage. That isn't how people fall in love.

The state of New Jersey is really two places - terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. It's very romantic in that way, but a bit naive. I like to play with that in my work.

The only thing I would unequivocally say is that I have never had any interest in romantic comedy I just couldn't do it. I think I'd be terrible.

The romantic idea of the penniless writer is false. It's terrible. I hated being in debt. I hated the anxiety of not knowing whether we could pay our rent that month. Thankfully, I had a wife who was very supportive and had faith and shared my madness.

When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. That's a terrible burden.

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.

When I get depressed, I try to get something for the terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry.

My best time to write is right after coffee and breakfast - four eggs - because, full disclosure, I'm really a komodo dragon - and that's because then I'm energized but not so awake that the critical voice clicks on, the voice that sometimes says, 'Don't write that,' or, 'Man, that sentence is terrible - you should give up and go pet the cats.'

I took Pascal, and I was terrible. And then, when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it.