I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

Our problems started in Dallas, when the fire-breathing sheep destroyed the King Tut exhibit.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.

Evil must always be fought.

I don't care if I get kicked out of every rich kid club on the planet. I will never sacrifice my integrity as a DJ...ever.

People don't want other people to be people.

For what it’s worth: trust your feelings. I can’t promise that you’ll never get hurt again, but I can promise you the risk is worth it.

Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Brains are like toddlers. They are wonderful and should be treasured, but that doesn’t mean you should trust them to take care of you in an avalanche or process serotonin effectively.

Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.

I've been ignored for 20 years but now it's heartening to get some recognition.

If he thought at all, but I don't believe he ever thought, it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water.

I write at all different times. I write in my bed, I write at the table. I need to get it together. I'm working on a book and working, and just jam it in whenever it makes sense.

I never listened to the people who said I should give it up, which is the main advice I got.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

Rock n' roll is poison put to sound.

On his daughter, Ava: She is a relief from all the stress in my life; everyday she does something new and it is so amazing.

It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.