I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully.

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.

Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

I've had teammates I didn't get along with, who hasn't? I've never had a teammate call me a bad guy, while he was my teammate, and if he did when I was gone what kind of teammate was he anyway?

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

I'd never kill myself for a man. I wouldn't do it for anybody.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

You do the best you can with what's thrown at you, then you try again.