Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything.

Everything alive must die. Every building built to the sky will fall. Don't try to tell me my everlasting love is a lie.

I don't like being in public with headphones on. I don't know how people can do it. It seems like you're so cut off from your environment. I feel like I'd get hit by a car.

What you once were isn't what you want to be anymore.

I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself.

You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.

Anybody who'd expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It's so antithetical to being a musician.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

We live in a connected world now. Some find that frightening. If people are downloading our music, they're listening to it. The internet is like radio for us.

from the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that.

The paparazzi terrify and torment people and endanger people and it's really unpleasant.

I've actually tried to give Brett Ratner dance lessons, but he thinks he already knows how to.

There is inside you all of the potential to be whatever you want to be all of the energy to do whatever you want to do.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

I shop only at thrift stores and vintage stores. In New York, I like a place called Star Struck, and a place called The Family Jewels.

Music is just air moving around.

Consultants are people who borrow your watch and tell you what time it is, and then walk off with the watch.

I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen to me, which is more or less as pathetic as it sounds.

My principle is to do whatever is right, and leave consequences to him who has the disposal of them.