My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.

I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.

I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades ago.

I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.

I'd make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.

The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.

There's nothing like doing something wrong to learn how it might be done better.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

Goth was sort of the melancholy cousin of punk that says: there's a lot of evil in this world, there's a lot of very mean spirited people and that makes me sad.

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.

I want to go and see things as a fan again. I am a fan, but I can't remember what it feels like to be a fan anymore. Because I've become an artist. I've become the artist.

There is more in the education of children than the everlasting iteration of the word "don't!"

Grief is an expression that you loved well.

My dad's so likeable, you wouldn't feel in competition with him. If any boyfriends have ever felt that, they're long gone.

I" cannot reach fulfillment without "thou." The self cannot be self without other selves. Self-concern without other-concern is like a tributary that has no outward flow to the ocean.

Pure memory isn't based on recall but rather involuntary memory that's in your body and your nerves.

I was raised to want to work for a living. The idea of just sitting around or going shopping every day appalls me.

I try to watch only real things, which basically amounts to C-Span for me. I like real people in real situations. I learn from that.