“You have a career, the reason why we’re still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.”

Being in a band is about making the band the priority.

You aren’t really writing about what you did; you’re writing about how you feel.

Over and over again in my life, I find closeness to other people and proximity to other people really painful; that’s part of my mental illness, social anxiety.

I’m really good in a crisis, because I don’t panic.

I’m really good in pain. I snapped my leg in half on stage and played a whole show. But I can’t sit there with someone that loves me.

There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process.

My life isn’t necessarily more important than anyone else’s: I’m just better in talking about it.

Your misery is everyone else’s entertainment.

I think I’d been limiting myself in some ways just writing in first person all the time.

We waste a lot of our lives sometimes. There are people sitting across from us who would make the whole world better if we spent more time with them in it, but we can’t get across that gully.

You don’t understand what makes you understand what makes your life better until you take something that makes it so much worse and you embrace that.

It’s impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It’s the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.

When so much money is involved in these movies, someone somewhere is going to try to screw you.

But what you realise after you’ve been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don’t have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

I can’t remember all the times I’ve tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

My main concern when travelling around the world is finding a place to skateboard!

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.

Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.

Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa around, And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn