When I am not writing, I'm dying.

Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.

Chelsea Morning is a great Joni Mitchell song and I guess I'm partial to her lyrics because they show me a slightly different perspective on life.

When you're on a merry-go-round, you miss a lot of the scenery.

Songs are life in 80 words or less.

Brooklyn is not the easiest place to grow up in, although I wouldn't change that experience for anything.

Love is still a simple act of faith, and a faithful heart is always worth the wait.

The music is key. It has the power to transport you. I go from being a slightly insecure, shy kind of a person offstage, to this super-confident, motivated, entity onstage.

Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest.

Then come and as we lay, beside this sleepy glade, there I will sing to you my Longfellow serenade.

Drop your shrink and stop your drinkin', crunchy granola's neat.

I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.

Sometimes the best solution is simplification.

They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

You see, Mr. President - real leaders don't follow polls. Real leaders change polls.

I know runners who have suffered a tick bite and ended up with Lyme disease. Ill take an angry moose any day.

Power is a disease one has no desire to be cured of.

It's so crazy because kids that wrote to me when they were 14 years old are still in my life. A lot have gone on to become musicians and artists in their own right who inspire me now.

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it. Cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.