One of the things you do in a band is the more you stay together, the more you play to your strengths.

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.

Fate controls only the weak, Your Highness. The strong mould the providence the want

Paris without a good book is like a pretty girl with only one eye.

If I should die think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get.

I'm really good at laundry, and I have no problem cleaning the kitchen.

Our vets are not being treated properly. They're not being treated fairly.

Style is the perfection of a point of view.

There is enough time in every day to do God's work...in God's way.

It’s a cliché - but true - that life is not a dress rehearsal. You get to do it once, so do it well.