“Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can’t stand us, and people who absolutely can’t live without us. I’d rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.”

As you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I’ve always been able to rely on.

A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don’t feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind.

Around that same time I started running. I never saw myself as the kind of person who would become a runner. It seemed unfathomable to me that I would ever run three miles, let alone 26.2.

And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.

There are the people that are like, “I want it to sound like 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.

I just rediscovered my guitar.

The story of our band is that we were this relentless touring band in those early years. We were leaving day jobs and going off on the road and having fun and seeing the country for the first time.

Bands who are in their early 20s today, they are living in their own time and they have a series of parameters they have to work around.

I’ve covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don’t think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.

I don’t want to be overly dramatic and say it’s the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go.

I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real. And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd.

Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.

I’m a war of head versus heart, it’s always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say.

When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record.

If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it’s that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.

I felt how important the simplest things were, like feeling proud, finding something funny, stretching yourself, retreating into yourself.

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and read of the miseries which affect the world.

Whenever feeling downcast, each person should vitally remember, “For my sake, the entire world was created.”

It’s a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.

When I’m in the mode of feeling positive about love, I don’t really feel the need to mark it down in song. In fact, I know what that song would sound like, and I would not subject anybody to that.

I think that music and art and film, at their best, can connect with something that is eternal in human beings, that might not have so many labels on it, something that’s ultimately universal and that may just be a feeling.

I never had secure, belonging feelings with this society [in China].