For a long time I was interested in being a social worker. In a lot of ways I feel that that's all my music is, trying to help people.

Most of the music you hear on the radio today is developed for making money. It doesn't feel true or honest. You can feel it in the music.

If something bothers me, it bothers me for a long time until I find a way to work it out. Music provided me with a means of working things out.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

And I've been walking 'round with memories way too long.

I honestly don't listen to a lot of music - I spend so much time working at my own music.

I was mainly influenced by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and others like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash.

We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

This is how it has been since time began: If you want to make something really worthwhile and true, then you have to suffer for it.

I've always been aware of having feelings that were pretty intense at times. I imagine most people have had that, or they wouldn't be human.

Yesterday was the last day on the calender of the past. Tomorrow will be the first day on the calender of the future. Today is both the first and the last day of the present. Use it well.

All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think?

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't believe that.

If we take good care of one another, God will take care of us.

I don't know whether what I do is art. But making things out in the world and having as many conversations as possible.

I think anybody would be hard pressed not to relate to at least one of the characters, because there's so many different multifaceted people populating this crazy world.

I like working intensely, then going away and thinking about it, working out why it didn't work and then coming back to it. It makes the work richer, I think.

One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to _ n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain!