I definitely hope to continue to release records at an accelerated pace.

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.

History is lived through and, for the fortunate, survived by people.

Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

A perfectly straight shot with a big club is a fluke.

All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be effort, and the law of human judgment, mercy.

An excess of hoarded wealth is the death of many.

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.

I don't think I could do a reality show, no.

I do not fear death. I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.