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.

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.

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.

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

Expectations is the mother of all negative energies within in you...

Winter is nature's way of saying, 'Up yours.'

After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and the life you have left.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

That's not true. I did not have sexual intercourse with Lindsay Lohan. ... A lot of people probably did, I don't know, [but I did not].

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is "no." That's not America.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Lawyers are operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass.

Ocean people are very different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes.