There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America / Have such a sad time together.

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.

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.

Men ought to be a four-letter word! Menn!

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.

We need to be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. It's not enough just to change the system. We need to change ourselves.

When something isn't done, you want to do something about it.

The Olympic Games of the Modern Era began in 1896 in the city of Athens.

A real businessman or entrepreneur has no enemies. Once he understand this, the sky's the limit.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

The Charkha is the symbol of nonviolence on which all life, if it is to be real life, must be based.

Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.