Where I grew up in Dallas, things might be a little more traditional. People have the same things in mind. They're supposed to grow up, go to college, get a job, get married, and have children, grandchildren. That's the world I grew up in.
Despite fashioning myself a very unconventional lifestyle with my music, I had ended up in a really conventional situation. I was also guilty of becoming a people-pleaser, which is absolutely exhausting and not a sustainable way of living. It can be so damaging to fall into that trap, especially in close relationships.
Everybody wants you to do good things, but in a small town you pretty much graduate and get married. Mostly you marry, have children and go to their football games.
Point-blank, I don't want to raise a family in baseball. Maybe I just want to be normal.
I'm a boring guy - I have a wife and three kids. I'm not like Mr. Controversy.
I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.
All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
I was very studious and square in college.
Someday I might have to put down a basketball and have a regular 9-to-5 like everybody else.
I come from a very straight and adjusted suburban background.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.
You know, my life's changed now. I'm starting to experience what people are really supposed to do. You supposed to be married. You're supposed to have a family, kids, treat your wife right.
Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.
We both came from families in which parents got married, had children and the whole thing. So we were not the kind of people to live together permanently.
I've led a very middle-class, very boring kind of life.
Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.
Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.
My parents constantly tried to talk me out of being an artist. They had gone through the whole journey with my sister and just wanted me to have a normal teenage life.
I sleep - laying down, not on the ceiling. Nothing about my life is crazy. I fly a lot, I travel a lot. I eat and sleep like everyone else.
I think I am a conservative, not-so-cool kind of guy.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie. My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I'm what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.
Dad has worked as a banker at the same firm in Boston, living in the same suburban neighborhood for over 50 years. Later in life, when I got out of graduate school and imagined myself living the life of a writer like Hemingway or Kerouac, his practical self inevitably encouraged me to get a steady a job and raise a family, just like he did.
If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s.
I'm not white-picket-fence perfect.
