Some people will totally get restless, since you can make demos pretty easy. It's not unreasonable for someone to say, "All right, can you just record this and go home and work on it?"

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.

And how long will your fingers be so tangled in the law that you can't live out of My grace?

To have created a Welfare State was a great achievement; but we must go on to create a Welfare Planet.

Writing is one way to achieve enchantment.

The Lord uses his flail of tribulation to separate the chaff from the wheat.

It is very difficult to give a 15 second sound bite on why there is pain and suffering in this world and not have it come off as being flippant or surface level or superficial.

Any age is the perfect age to follow your dream!

Reason speaks and feeling bites

Everything that I write comes when it wants to, out of its own need and it dictates its form. I don't say, "I am going to write a novel."

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.

To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.