Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.

Music drives you. It wakes you up, it gets you pumping. And, at the end of the day, the correct tune will chill you down.

When I tried to play something and screwed up, I'd hear some other note that would come into play. Then I started trying different things to find the beauty in it.

My old man was a musician - that's what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he'd let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.

The worst advice I ever received from my dad was to play by the book.

Musicians tend to get bored playing the same thing over and over, so I think it's natural to experiment.

If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.

It kills me when I see some metal band trying to pass themselves off as an 'alternative band.

Lessons didn't really work out for me, so I went to the old school, listening to records and learning what I wanted to learn.

I'm not saying I wouldn't play a seven-string. It's just that I've never needed one. Most dudes who play seven-strings don't sound any different than someone playing a six-string that's tuned down.

To get my sound in the studio, I double guitar tracks, and when it gets to the lead parts, the rhythm drops out, just like it's live. I'm very conscious of that.

The ocean, the desert, and the jungle are the last strongholds and resorts of peace. ("Fear")

Its not what the universe gives us that matters, but what we give the universe

There are two types of encryption: one that will prevent your sister from reading your diary and one that will prevent your government.

No love is foule, nor prison fair.

Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little.

There's something touching about a kid who's reading a book that's printed on actual paper. I think that anything that kids start reading, within reason, can lead to other discoveries.

Love delights and glorifies in giving, not receiving.

I do not find God outside myself or conceive him except as my own and in me.

The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.