I can talk about feelings, but I can't talk about why this chord on top of this chord sounds cool to me. It just makes me feel a certain way, and I like it.

That's just the way people's brains work. If you want to talk about something, you have to reduce it to a form that can be understood. That's one of the reasons I'm not good about boiling down music.

When I joined the band I was coming largely from an improvising background, and the idea of a fluid rhythm that was really coherent attracted me.

For me, the voice expresses things that there are just no other ways to express.

I'm pretty resigned to the fact that I never hear music the way anyone else does, and I no longer find it surprising.

I think I know what my bandmates like or are interested in or would be interested in doing. I take ideas and I develop them, get rid of some ideas, keep writing, and then new things come up.

When I dream about music, or think about music, by myself, I try to be as free as possible and allow my creative mind full reign.

Some of my favorite music is incredibly repetitive, or on the surface has an element of repetition. But once you go beneath the surface, you realize in the repetition is constant variation.

I have to say I've been lucky in that way in that I've been able to go from different films and different genres with different challenges.

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

You look at public education system, charter schools, infrastructure, in so many ways New Orleans has come back stronger.

If you pick up a golfer and hold it close to your ear, like a conch shell, and listen, you will hear an alibi.

In a global arena, what our businessmen need in order to be competitive is transparency and a level playing-field.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor.

Men are sometimes hanged for telling the truth.

No one has ever been able to convince me that optimism is not preferable to pessimism.

Listen, if you're a hardworking steelworker or truck driver, that drives down your wages. That takes away your jobs.