I didn't know who Meredith Monk was, and I knew about Laurie Anderson but I didn't know her music that well.

Harmony has always come very natural to us because we started singing harmony at an early age. We heard a lot of different music growing up.

People want to hear clean sounds; they don't want to hear coughing in the background, pages turning.

I remember watching Looney Tunes cartoons and having the music stuck in my head.

I like things that start depressing and dark and end up romantic, and thats what I really loved about King Kong.

I always related my favorite music to the movies.

The first song I wrote was "Look Both Ways Before You Cross" from Imaginaryland. I started the song by singing a bass line, "hoo hoo hoo hoo."

The Conversation was a movie I saw probably for the first time in the early 2000s. I immediately loved the piano and just how simple it is.

My grandparents on my mom's side played in a mandolin orchestra. So when I hear mandolins, I automatically think of them.

Everyone knows about The Who, but I didn't. I knew the popular songs like "I Can See For Miles." So that was the first song I worked on because it was the catchiest and easiest.

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.

Plus, I happened to be a history nerd. Why else would I be interested in a guy born in the year 519?

Where's the victory without opposition?--Joel

The uglier the caterpillar the lovelier the butterfly.

ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN BUT IT TAKES A GODDESS TO GET OUT OF ONE.

Give yourself entirely to God, enter and hide in the hidden ground of your soul.

Anybody can be hurt. This is boxing.

So there will be a bill. We've been working on it now for a year.

I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long.

If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.

People say that this new generation is so used to the Internet that their heads are already different. They can't read a book from beginning to end. That is not a tragedy. The book changes form.