“At this point in my life, I find myself obsessed with alternate paths I could’ve taken. I don’t think about this with a sense of regret, but with a sense of wonder.”

More times than not, it’s a failed endeavor. You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors.

I don’t think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.

Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones.

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. … Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It’s a language aside from the language they have with strangers.

I don’t think Chris realized he was in a band until 2001. He all of a sudden woke up one day and realized he was in a band. He thought he was just recording my solo project. Three albums later, we’re in Baltimore trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.

For me, a song doesn’t really take flight until it has a lyric on it. …Without a lyric that I’m happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn’t have any resonance.

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’m not a policy oriented person. I’m constrained to what I study. But educational policy has not yet taken adequate note of the whole child. Kids are not just their IQ or standardized test scores. It matters whether or not they show up, how hard they work.

People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.

It’s been a journey, the NBA. It’s taken me a lot farther than I ever expected.

You cannot live a normal existence if you haven’t taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.

I’m sure all actors have trouble. The guy who always plays the funny guy, he wants to be taken seriously. And there’s the action guy who wants to do serious stuff. Everyone’s grass is greener.

Nobody is starving on the streets. We’ve always taken care of them. We take care of our own; we always have. It is not the government’s responsibility.

The path we’re on has taken the USA to the brink of bankruptcy.

If John McDonnell nationalised whole industries, they would be quickly taken over by bureaucrats more concerned about their careers than about customers.