“You think you’ve made something really great, but there’s a reason why it’s not resonating the way some previous work did. But it’s not that easy to just replicate.”

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend’s driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

That’s the most important thing, to get along with people. When you feel like you click with them.

I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.

Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won’t bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records.

I don’t like to have everything all worked out in my head because there’s always a chance of it coming out different than you think it should anyway.

I think everybody has a painter inside of them somewhere.

I have had UFO experiences, and yet, at the same time, I can easily be convinced that none of it is true. It’s hard to say whether or not you’re a believer.

It’s obvious you shouldn’t steal, kill or be cruel.

I don’t want to do children’s music. I write kids songs, but the kids songs I write are for my kids – like when I’m putting them to bed.

I’m always looking to rock out. But it isn’t really about rocking out versus being mellow, in terms of your personal satisfaction. In the end, you just want to be good.

When I think about that I get stimulated and excited. It’s a feeling that you can’t label with words.

If I have more creativity that I want to get out of me, I try to find other ways than pursuing solo records so much.

This is a particular thing, you know, catholic stories of martyrs who had their head removed and then continued to be miraculous in the last moments of their life.

That’s more important even then what their background is or what they’ve done before, how good they are, how new they are or whatever. All that stuff is really secondary to just getting along with the person.

You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual.

It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.

The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.

There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.

It’s rather mystifying when you think about writing songs – where they come from, and how they’re born.