“I could probably live in Bali the rest of my life and completely live in the sticks and have a f – king moped and make a record every couple of years and not step in public and break even like I do anyway. That’s really tempting.”

But I really do have a soft spot for the solo shows. Any musician who writes and sings will tell you that’s the center of it, that is it. It’s almost like there’s something church-like about it and you gotta go back there, if you’re a songwriter that sings your material.

I’m not really a strange person or anything, so if there’s music I like, usually there’s other people who like it too.

In many ways, I’ve chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don’t like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.

The way I see it, there’s only one melody for any song.

The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

The reason I stop playing songs is usually because I get sick of them, and then they find themselves back into the set list at some point.

Notes don’t make music until you learn to insert silence between them.

I have manic energy. What can be done about it? I don’t know what to say sometimes. I’m professional in public, but I like to stay inside and be a hermit.

White people don’t sing together very often, and when they do, it’s about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.

Being capable of anything is a bullshit concept, unless it means you also admit that you’re capable of cheating, lying and killing.

The press is like any business. Its a group of really intelligent individuals that ends up being one slathering, one-eyed, drooling monster.

I’m romantically inclined. No human being on Earth is not attracted to other people. There is no fairy tale that they only have eyes for you. You just choose to act on it or not.

I’m aware that I’m very fringe, and it’s nice that way.

You can’t really control how people hear stuff. It’s hard to remember that. I have to let go of it.

I do think that when you make repeated mistakes, it’s usually because you’re just not coming to grips with something.

My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that’s the right song to not fight the lyric.

My child, seek those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the King against the Church, and urge upon him a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in return promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn’t elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months.

The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.

Those who possess that treasure which no thief can take away, Which, though on suppliants freely spent, increaseth day by day,

The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin’s Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.

If horse racing is the sport of kings, then drag racing must be the sport of queens.

A man sentenced to death obtained a reprieve by assuring the king he would teach his majesty’s horse to fly within the year – on the condition that if he didn’t succeed, he would be put to death at the end of the year. “Within a year,” the man explained later.