“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.”

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.

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

Bravery is what you can do in the face of things that hurt and scare you, but you do it anyway.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.

Or people say, ‘Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.’ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

Yeah, I know I’m ugly… I said to a bartender, ‘Make me a zombie.’ He said ‘God beat me to it.’

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.