“I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.”

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.

Touring is really a weird social experiment, even though everyone thinks it’s a party every day.

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

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 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.

Painting and animation can be kind of long work. Music was more immediate and more fun.

The cynicism doesn’t come across in the final; it can be taken as a very sincere plea for someone to not go away.

There was something in me, even leaving fifth grade, that hit me and said, “I have to get out of here. I don’t know where, and I don’t know what else I can do but I’m really not going to end up like any of these people.”

Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.

I’ve had terrible, terrible, terrible shows where I just thought, “That was off-key” or I forgot lines or I thought I looked like an idiot, and then you’re leaving and talking to people, and they’re like, “I had the best time of my life! That was amazing!” You just never know.

There are people who kind of let you know that you can silence the room.

I was living in a loft with Dave Sitek – this loft full of people just working on their stuff. Some were painting, some were writing. Any plans you had were kind of like a plan for the next two months.

You have to be a really talented writer if you’re trying to encapsulate a news story with a song and have it live after the event. I don’t have the focus to do that, really.

A lot of people have reunion things, but I think bands are supposed to break up.

I feel like now if you’re going to start a band you have to have an Instagram full of yourself looking a certain way, lined up like five dudes in mugshot alley, hanging out by the bridge or up against the wall, or “We’re in a library for some reason!”

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.

The elements of a good story are most definitely details, little bitty details. That does it, especially when you’re describing, when you’re setting the scene and everything. It’s like you’re painting a picture, so details are very important. Also, the music gotta be right.

I am a ‘little messiah’ walking on earth.

You have to be alert. When my daughter, Sophie, came out of the womb, she was instantly alert, as if she had been here before. And she was a little disappointed that she was here again.

Music is so powerful to me. I had my IPod and headphones, and my sad playlist. I kind of ventured off for just a little bit to get into the scene.

As a model, you really get to work everywhere in the world. You get a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Black audiences are hard. They always think they’re better than you. So you got to come with a little extra to satisfy them.

Ultimately, the best runners are the ones who are willing to work very hard but who have a little bit of a lazy streak in them.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.