“The late ’90s were a really bad time for people trying to be rock stars, you know what I mean? It seemed like everyone was a one-hit wonder on the radio.”

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late ’50s, early ’60s kind of world.

The Photo Album is the weakest record. For the first time in our careers, we found ourselves with an economic incentive to be on the road and to be making albums.

Every record we do there are always two camps. There’s the camp that’s like, “I love it. It sounds different than the last one.”

You can’t please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.

We always idealize the past because we don’t feel the painful stuff the way we used to.

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It’s a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.

I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.

Nada Surf and Harvey Danger are good bands. I think they’ve just stayed true to why they play music in the first place, it’s just because they love doing it and they love each other and that’s the impetus for doing it, not trying to keep singles on the radio and on MTV.

I was literally just going and applying for jobs, and I couldn’t get a job, and I was getting more and more broke, and you find yourself groveling for jobs you don’t even want.

I don’t spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself – and if other people like it, that’s great.

I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me.

I kind of dropped a lot of bad habits about three years ago and became kind of accidentally straight-edge. I don’t have Xs on my hands, but I guess if I wanted to go back to calling myself straight-edge, I could.

There were a lot of fences and walls existing in my life, literally and figuratively, and that was really not indicative of the kind of person that I’d always been. So, when I moved back to Seattle, the first thing I said was, “I will never live in fear again.”

I’d like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack.

We wanted to be like R.E.M., but the reality is that 15 years after R.E.M. was putting out those records, the playing field had changed drastically as well.

We would scoff at the idea of a nice studio. “Why would you want to go to a nice studio? Oh wow, they have really expensive gear. Ooh, that’s really fancy. Well we’ve got an eight-track. We’ve got it going on here.”

I think every woman in this country will understand what it means to be mansplained to. It happens in everyday life – you know, if you go into a shop, or you’re talking about finance.

The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

To bear the cross means that you refrain from doing what you have the power to do. You are qualified to fulfill your desire, yet you refrain from doing so.

I am a hidden meaning made to defy. The grasp of words, and walk away With free will and destiny. As living, revolutionary clay.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

Repentance means a change of mind. Formerly, I thought sin as a pleasant thing, but now I have changed my mind about it. Formerly, I thought the world an attractive place, but now I know better.

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects.

The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.