If you wait four or five years between records, it better be a masterpiece, you know? And if you keep putting them out, you're saying, 'Hey, here's 10 more songs'.

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.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Genius begins great works labor alone finishes them.

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.

One of the things I've learned is there's no lesson to be learned. You have to resign yourself to the fact that mistakes are going to be made at any time in the creative process.

And may we find when ended is the page, Death but a tavern on our pilgrimage.

You won't believe how many people have congratulated me around the world for shooting a movie in 2D. It's bizarre. It's the strangest thing.

When I was a child, I went to stage school three times a week in the evenings - singing, ballet, tap, modern and acting, and I loved it.

May all our contemporaries stand beside their brothers and sisters in humanity. Each one of you is called by Christ and must be a missionary of the Good News in word and in active charity.

I used to do stuff at college. I could do voices. I could make some people laugh. I wasn't the class clown, but I knew I had this skill.

I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.