I thought [ as a kid], "Maybe I don't want to start a punk band necessarily. I just want to learn to be a great songwriter," and got really into trying to figure out how that could be possible.

I think I gravitate towards rock 'n' roll as a playground where I can say anything.

I think most of the work of songwriting is thinking of great phrases - I'm addicted, always on the hunt for a really great phrase.

I'm an amateur at music and an amateur at most things. I like the idea of offering some music and some records and a website to people who feel perplexed.

I had so many secrets and so much social repression throughout my life. I guess I'm just a shy person and feel like my true self is unacceptable to most people.

I'm certainly not interested in religion for religion's sake or for some kind of structure or stabilizing force. Religion is supposed to be for God's sake and God is an unpredictable, wild thing.

Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan I heard when I was 13. It was one of those things where it was like, "Hey, the world is much bigger than you imagined as a little kid."

What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.

Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

Secrets are gold and we are the miners.

Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God.

When you love people like Jesus, you get messy. But messy looks good on you!

Personally, I've made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. What scares you, is not your weaknesses, but your strengths.

The vast majority of people who watch baseball can properly call 95% of all plays that happen on the field. My job is to teach you how to call the other 5%.

You go ahead. I'd rather not be shot out of a tube into a pool filled with a bunch of nine-year-olds' urine.

All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.

My daughter, I see more Pharisees among Christians than there were around Pilate.