When you're making an album with people who made your favorite records as a rebellious teenager, it feels like you've achieved something.

I never want to listen to the songs in front of people close to me. There's an emotional honesty in that place where it's not earnest but it's vulnerable.

I'm definitely preoccupied by thinking I'm just a biological thing. I want to feel that there's more, but so often I'm reminded of how we're just like baboons, basically.

Music was my friend when I was a teenager, and I would inhabit and take comfort in lyrics. That's how I want to write.

I started growing roses. I enjoyed the craft of it and that they're difficult to look after; they can provide joy.

I like the fervor of religious music, the zealous aspect - that preachers can go from a conversational cadence into this passionate singing.

You can get into a comfort zone writing lyrics, like wearing a mask. But I wanted to feel uncomfortable when I was listening back to the lyrics; I wanted to squirm.

I like simple writing. I'd rather read Hemingway than Burroughs.

I was definitely inspired by gospel music, or old-school R&B I got into some Good God gospel compilations.

I'm just worn down and weary of bands whose lyrics are cryptic and self-referential.

I'm appalled by the tendency of some rock records to perfect everything to the point where it sounds like Botox and polish it so heavily that there's no humanity left in it.

Love is bliss only if you are a giver, not otherwise.

Your life can only be as good or as bad as you frequently interpret it to be.

You know, there's no more dangerous creature on Earth than the teenage girl.

It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

Death is the great hope of all life; the desire to expend itself; to be used and consumed by its own longing for itself.

[Meeting Mandela] was the highlight of my career; to meet such a great man and a strong man and such a passionate man about sport and life will always stay with me.

In fact the Hillary [Clinton] convention which did very well but not nearly as well as mine, in all fairness, would've gotten one-third the ratings they got if I weren't.

Aim low, reach your goals, and avoid disappointment.

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.