I miss smoking (two to four packs a day) but I don't miss the crackle in my lungs when I breathed.

I don't really get romance. Bring me fish or moose, not flowers.

Once your writing is out there, you can't control how other people perceive it. All you can do is stand in your truth.

I was born on the same day as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton: January 19. I am absolutely certain that this affects my writing in some way.

Autumn. Pretty leaves, pumpkin pie and sweaters. Perfect weather for reading. Winter is great but I hate shoveling.

I think we learn slowly as a group, but we learn. The ozone layer is still there.

I find myself moved by social justice issues. I'm not sure where that will lead me. I'm willing to nurture it.

We can be the new brand of self-extincting dinosaurs or we can evolve.

Our ability to turn off empathy for specific kinds of humans and then use faulty logic to justify our beliefs is messily sociopathic.

I don't think anyone's normal.

In general, I'm careful when I'm dealing with subjects of deep cultural importance and write with abandon when I'm dealing with issues of personal dysfunction.

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

Music is happiness with a steady pulse.

One should marry when one stops having a good time and settle down.

I couldn't write a song to save my life. I wouldn't say that I started to panic, but I was definitely getting frustrated. I couldn't even cross a t or dot an i.

You can ask Beavis... I get nothing but head.

I was freakishly ambitious. I didn't want to be a child. I wanted my own flat, to work and be a grown up.

Singing in Gaelic is very, very natural to do. I think lends itself very much so to being sung.

Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.

There's so many people out there who try to imitate what I do but I am the original.

I've heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner.