I can't work in Brooklyn. Unless I'm completely locked away in a studio, there's just too much distraction and stimulation.

It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, 'Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don't need to understand everything, maybe I don't need to be someone else.'

The more I know, the more I realise I don't know. And the more I realise I'll never truly understand.

You always know when a real inspiration is behind the melody, arrangements, even lyrics. And I know that's really vague, but it's true.

Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.

My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.

I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life.

I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.

I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.

I feel like I've met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.

See life for what it is - a blessing to be lived - rather than what is so often reduced to

We had everything: love, attention, the best money could buy, but we were taught that we had to first give to then receive.

[In] every revolution, there is a great divergence between what the revolutionaries expect and what the revolution actually accomplishes.

The squaring of the circle is a stage on the way to the unconscious, a point of transition leading to a goal lying as yet unformulated beyond it. It is one of those paths to the centre.

I wasn't really aware they were a religious organization for quite some time. But my grandparents were very devout and ran a Quaker meetinghouse and were missionaries at one point.

It's becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the national surveillance agency. It's gaining more offensive powers with each passing year.

My sister and my brother, of whom I have not spoken before, were considerably older than I; it seemed almost as if we belonged to different generations.

Physical geography and geology are inseparable scientific twins.

Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.

A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.