When I'm in the mode of feeling positive about love, I don't really feel the need to mark it down in song. In fact, I know what that song would sound like, and I would not subject anybody to that.

I want to be around these positive, expressive people who are doing something different and who also want to get the hell out of there and don't want to be around basic human bullshit.

If you push hard enough you can change. You can take everything you know and round it up, turn it into something else, and keep turning things into something else.

My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side.

Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.

It's insane when someone shows up to your show and is like, "You could run off with me right now!" I'm like, "It's cool, I think I'm gonna go read."

There are a lot of spikes that can happen when what you're doing starts to get attention or people start to talk about it. They can just kind of really do a number on your reasons for making music.

Hearing that [David] Bowie passed was like you don't really believe it. It's as if the sky shifted a little bit, to remind you it was there.

I like the model of people getting together to make something when they want to do it and not being dictated to by a cycle.

I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.

Most of the bands that I really like no longer exist. That might just be because I'm in my thirties or whatever. But I also think it's the rare band that doesn't, like, turn into something else.

Show the world you are not here to just pass through. Leave great footprints wherever you pass and be remembered for the change you initiated.

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

When a woman becomes her individual most effective close friend existence is simpler.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - just paint Spring.

But in the former, those movie sets that you've been on like that, even if they're huge movies and most of its being spent in special effects afterwards, I think that's the way that we're going.

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

My worst flight was flying between Macau and Osaka in 2007. The turbulence was so bad that the cabin crew were assuming their crash positions. I had more than a bit of a sweat on.

...operational proof...it's all theory until you see for yourself whether or not something works.

The most successful people are those who are wildly enthusiastic about their work.

The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.