I can still sing most Eagles songs, even though I never bought a record and never liked the band.

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.

You are a writer when your overwhelming need to tell a story outweighs your fear of ridicule.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.

I have found God to be cordial and generous and in every way easy to live with.

When your focus is social change and not financial change why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared.

I'm just trying to choose interesting, quirky projects or things with interesting directors or just movies that have a lot of people I like attached to them so I know I'm going to have a good time.

You can't get a job without experience and you can't get experience until you have a job. Once you solve that problem you are home free.

If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.

Yes, I love white, and I'd wear it all the time if I could. Some people think I have an issue with cleanliness, but to me it's just so pretty.

America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.