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

People aren’t going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They’d rather just have the martini.

Everything I write is personal, really. Even when I’m sarcastic, it’s quite personal. And on this record, from the production to the singing to the performances, I got it really honest.

If I’m in a relationship and my girlfriend is sleeping with other people, I don’t need to know who it is; I just want to know how she feels about it.

I start songs all the time. If I weren’t so lazy, I would finish them. It’s like when I have a deadline I have to.

I divorce myself from listeners who aren’t tolerant of humor. I did notice universally that, especially when it comes to weight, people look in the mirror and get the angle just right, tell themselves it’s all right, and then they go out.

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.

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.

Many people are being persuaded that they cannot be considered intelligent or well educated if they insist on the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Book.

To endow clock time with numinous meaning [is] hardly a fit occupation for an intelligent person.

Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.

Invaluable….the best one-stop source I’ve seen for what various officials actually said at various times, suffused with intelligent analysis.

Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?

The world holds two classes of men; intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.