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.

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.

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.

One of the things you do in a band is the more you stay together, the more you play to your strengths.

We are at war. War has a way of stripping us of perspective. War is about life and death, and it paints everything in shades of now or never.

Haste and panic were poor traveling companions, and this trip he'd reaped the consequences in spades.

It is the dirt within men’s hearts that is most offensive

The course is so long, I had to take the curvature of the Earth into consideration.

The faulty stands on his guard.

The easiest time to cure an illness is before it is accepted as a part of the self-image.

What's the whole point of being pretty on the outside when you're so ugly on the inside?

'I beg your pardon?' Alice said with a puzzled air. 'I'm not offended,' said Humpty Dumpty.

A lighthouse is not interested in who gets its light! It just gives it without thinking! Giving light is its nature!

Yet there is disappointment in Washington and in the United States that Canada is not supporting us fully.