I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.

It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, 'Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don't need to understand everything, maybe I don't need to be someone else.'

The more I know, the more I realise I don't know. And the more I realise I'll never truly understand.

You always know when a real inspiration is behind the melody, arrangements, even lyrics. And I know that's really vague, but it's true.

Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.

My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.

I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life.

I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.

I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.

I feel like I've met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.

The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart.

Tough times never last, but tough people do.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.

He worked at stealing her heart to replace the one she'd taken from him.

I've tried every kind of bottled water, but Poland Spring is my go-to. I always have room-temperature bottles of it on side of stage for post-performance.

I really want to love somebody. I do. I just don't know if it's possible forever and ever.

I would say that hardware is the bone of the head, the skull. The semiconductor is the brain within the head. The software is the wisdom and data is the knowledge.

If you gave me a fresh carnation, I would only crush its tender petals.

We are serving no one man, we are serving our country.