When you read enough stories about people who have been through different levels of trauma, and it doesn't matter what the history is, trauma is trauma, there's always this freeing of the spirit.

I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things.

New York is beautiful, but [the South] makes it look like a wasteland.

I have a really big interest in the spirit world: spooks and the things we can't necessarily see but feel.

Someone can do anything they want to you on the outside, but whatever they do to me they cannot destroy what's on my inside. Mentally that cannot be taken away from me, no matter what someone does.

A lot of my video work is super lo-fi on purpose. I'm not trying to become technically super proficient. The only thing I'm interested in becoming technically proficient on is my alto saxophone.

I'm a history geek and I love American history. It's so bizarre and so problematic and I love the many conundrums that it represents. You can go down so many black holes.

Leading a band is fun, but it's not always something I want to continually focus on. I have my toes in a lot of different things.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind, and fearless.

When you see the veins popping out of my neck, that's an exclamation point.

The most important educational need of the child is to feel himself worthy of love and a worthy dispenser of love. If infants learn what love is, they can go through life with sanity and happiness.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

I am gone and am not coming back, but I remember everything.

I prefer men to boys. To clear it up, it's not about an older or younger thing. It's a mindset, not age. There are 18-year-old men out there and there are 40-year-old boys.

Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.

Tell the world what you intend to do, but first show it.

...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.