As a writer, if you have something on a page, you can start moving it around and get something you like. But if you have a blank page, it's just gonna be a blank page.

People make maps of all the places I've mentioned. I knew that those people were out there. I wanted to create something for them.

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America / Have such a sad time together.

I really like narrative songs, but I wonder if that's a thing for some people. Once they've heard the story, do they really need to hear the story again?

I'm able to draw outside my own personal experiences. No one wants to hear the song about what I really did today, which is go get coffee and clean my apartment.

When people hit on feeling a certain melancholy or elation, it's a really exciting moment. I think making that connection is the goal, and what makes something great.

Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, "We write to find out what we're thinking." And sometimes that happens.

I would never talk to a girl in a bar, like a pick-up thing. But I could talk to anyone if they wore a t-shirt of a band I like.

Just looking into something kind of analytically can give a lot of ideas.

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.

One of the things is my process requires a lot of repetition. I can probably drive people crazy because I'm interested in playing a song twenty times in a row.

The rich take life one financial year at a time. The poor take life one meal at a time.

I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

There's a lot of things I nerd out over. Quantum Mechanics. I also love Dungeons and Dragons. I want to be an astronaut.

When being is divorced from doing, pious thoughts become an adequate substitute for washing dirty feet.

I think violence in movies, for it to work, you have to use it smartly. People get numb very fast. If you have too much violence in the beginning, it gets to a point where you don't feel it.

Those who are addicted to the phrase "to use a vulgarism" expect to achieve the feat of being at once vulgar and superior to vulgarity.

Doubts are death. Doubts are the dry rot of life.

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.

I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired.