The songs are all indexes of a time in the past when I was writing them.

Sometimes I'll go out to say hi to people, and I'm just not ready for it. It feels too weird, too intense.

Every new generation of smartphone just has a different-shaped button. It's embarrassing.

I'm cool with being the sad guy, but I don't want to be the guy who nobody wants around because he's so miserable.

It's hard to see how much of our social fabric is made up of a radical refusal to love people.

What I'm confessing is that I've grown to a point where I feel like I should have more answers, and I don't. And I still think that applies in the George Saunders stuff.

Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the technology obsession.

The interesting thing about doing press is that I learn what the album is about - I now know, a year later, looking back, what was on my mind at the time.

Every time I think that I've pierced through the simulation, every time I feel like I've written something authentic, it feels like I then sort of lose my footing with it.

Elizabeth: "Maybe he'll surprise you."Meghann: "Birdie, they all surprise me. Last week, I hugged my date at the door and felt a bra strap.

Kindness is virtue itself.

TV and film has defined my entire life.

There is no such thing as an accident. It is all part of a master plan. Play your role as gracefully as you can and relax.

In the last analysis, luck comes only to the well prepared.

I don't do much cooking, but one of my favorite dishes to eat is my wife's macaroni and cheese.

When reason and instinct are reconciled, there will be no higher appeal.

Analogy cannot serve as proof.

More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crises until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.