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.

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

The nice thing about being an adolescent is being able to make mature decisions when you need them and being able to just flow alone with life when you don't.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

We love the Lord, of course, but we often wonder what He finds in us.

Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

Will it, and set to work briskly.

Sometimes there's not a direct transfer of skills from business to government, but sometimes what happened in business would be really bad for government.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

I was changing my outfits, my looks, my wig, sometimes several times a day. That's when I know my soul is restless.

Marriage is a big deal, but who's to say I'm not going to pull a Vegas and get married to see what it's like for a minute?