I didn't start playing music really until I was 18/19, so it was a relatively new thing. I didn't play much music in school.

Sometimes my hands they don’t feel like my own; I need someone to love, I need someone to hold.

I have some vivid memories of walking around as a child with a cassette tape.

I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like, and I'm very bad at toning myself down.

I never was the front man in any bands I played in when I was in college, and I always learned music by myself at home.

You get one chance to make an impression and coasting through is a disservice.

I'm very ambitious, musically - I want to create great things, not mediocre work.

I want to talk about things that are tangible and real to me, but I also want to do them in a way that's poetic and artistic.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

My love of R&B and hip-hop has influenced my life not even as a musician, but generally in terms of growing up and looking to America as an inspiration.

People have hope because they cannot see Death standing behind them.

Human life is created in God's image, and that makes it sacred.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.

There's no such thing as a perfect historical film.

New places always help us look at life differently

I think of it all as a test. This is a moral examination that one has to pass... to stand up against such social evils.

When I was growing up, I lived in a neighborhood that was largely Latino and I thought I was Latino!

I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.