I don't have a problem rhyming "bar" with "car" - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.

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.

I was always holding onto people, and they were always leaving.

Each person you admire is simply a reminder of your own latent excellence, your own unacknowledged beauty.

This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!

If you constantly make it clear that you are unwilling to budge, don't get upset when no one is around who's willing to give you a push.

Once you are dressed there may be still more you can do to enhance, complement, or complete your look. Simply changing your accessories will change your entire impression.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.

Your own transformation will enable you to withdraw so completely from evil that you contribute to it by not one word, one thought, or one breath. This healing process is like recovering your soul.

Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.

Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn't very feminine.

The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightening bold of inspiration, maybe more. And this routine is available to everyone.