There's a lot of ways to be honest that don't necessarily involve absolute facts being true. I think that's something I absolutely try to do.

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.

The more broken you are, the more light gets through.

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

There's something about strip malls that just reeks of my childhood.

Tyrion wondered what it would be like to have a twin, and decided that he would rather not know. Bad enough to face himself in a looking glass every day.

I'm happy to talk in general themes, but when we get down to specifics about my family, for me that's always been off-limits.

If you can't win, make sure you don't lose.

Music appeals to me for what can be done with it.

The whole worl's in a state o' chassis.

We must be brief when traitors brave the field.

Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more,—Macbeth shall sleep no more!