I never wrote poetry, just prose. I don't really consider songwriting a form of poetry either. The words are important, of course, but they're dependent on the music.

Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.

The sexuality of children - there's a lot friction there. That tension interests me a lot.

You make your work and you can't ask for approval when you're doing it. Otherwise, it's going to be untruthful in some way.

The goal is ecstasy, but I don't want to make some sort of saccharine pop music. I want to make something that's completely uncompromising: the best possible music ever made.

The music takes you. It has to be alive. It's like you hammer something, and the way it happens to bleed leads you into new directions.

I don't want to sound like everybody else.

I like loud electric guitars because I like how you can just lose your entire being in the sound.

I'm the band leader. That's not to say that the other people are my minions - they all put in a tremendous amount of personality, and push the music in ways I would never expect.

I used to routinely break my ribs doing stupid things onstage, but I have a healthy fear of breaking my bones now.

I'm pretty confident that people are going to come along for the ride. If they don't, tough.

They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

She finally understood why the monsters in the Forest always seemed to smile. Beasts only bared their teeth as a warning before they attack.

I don't mean this to sound hyperbolic but there are increasingly, albeit really minor, similarities between now and how Germany was lulled into what happened pre-WW2.

I caught a pebble in the moonlight.

A press card does not provide you with an invisible shield. You're flesh and blood.

My philosophy is pretty simple – any day nobody’s trying to kill me is a good day in my book.

Try to take your vision and ego as far away from the song as possible. Give as much respect as you can to the song and the initial inspiration.

I think that our strength is actually how niche our product is, and not that it's very commercial and very similar to things that are out there already.