You can't get every girl; you get the ones you love the best.

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.

If it can happen in your mind, it can happen in your camera

But they love each other. Isn't that what love means? That you're supposed to be there for the other person to turn to, no matter what?

It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.

If we keep bombing other people, that creates more anger. Tensions keep escalating.

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

I think for me it's just a matter of staying keyed into my lifelong friends from New York and family. And, you know, I'm pretty solitary. I'm a homebody. So I don't get out much to get into trouble

I lost everything in the post-natal depression.

You can't teach people anything. You can only draw out.

I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

At a time of such hope and optimism in the Middle East, we cannot let the Libyan government violate every principle of international law and human rights with impunity.