I think the other thing that shaped me a little bit is that I really didn't have any success in music until my early to mid-30s.

People make maps of all the places I've mentioned. I knew that those people were out there. I wanted to create something for them.

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America / Have such a sad time together.

I really like narrative songs, but I wonder if that's a thing for some people. Once they've heard the story, do they really need to hear the story again?

I'm able to draw outside my own personal experiences. No one wants to hear the song about what I really did today, which is go get coffee and clean my apartment.

When people hit on feeling a certain melancholy or elation, it's a really exciting moment. I think making that connection is the goal, and what makes something great.

Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, "We write to find out what we're thinking." And sometimes that happens.

I would never talk to a girl in a bar, like a pick-up thing. But I could talk to anyone if they wore a t-shirt of a band I like.

Just looking into something kind of analytically can give a lot of ideas.

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.

One of the things is my process requires a lot of repetition. I can probably drive people crazy because I'm interested in playing a song twenty times in a row.

Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the humans for more than one million years, science is just a one instant like a baby trying to talk.

Intuition is using the inner body energy and heart to pave the way for your life.

You are the master of your emotions and you and only you have the power to control them external and internal.

I am ready to serve the people of Afghanistan, particularly in order to restore peace. I will be ready to assume any duty at the service of my people.

A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

There are some people who have a low tolerance for criticism. I'm not one of those people.

I've spoken to people who I swear can tell the future.

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.