“Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting.”

Being 15 and like a punk in the DIY community, basically being with a group of people like no one else, it was the first place to exclude or call out if people were racist, sexist, homophobic or in any way prejudiced.

The feeling of being halfway through a show and just realizing that there’s nothing you can do to save it – it’s a horrible feeling.

Most of the bands that I really hold in my heart – you don’t think about them as bands; they’re just the soundtrack of your life.

I probably couldn’t have the same experience listening to that song because I’m self-conscious about some of my singing parts.

Hearing that [David] Bowie passed was like you don’t really believe it. It’s as if the sky shifted a little bit, to remind you it was there.

If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.

Most of the bands that I really like no longer exist. That might just be because I’m in my thirties or whatever. But I also think it’s the rare band that doesn’t, like, turn into something else.

It’s insane when someone shows up to your show and is like, “You could run off with me right now!” I’m like, “It’s cool, I think I’m gonna go read.”

Adding instruments to parts of a song and having them somehow find a pocket. That to me was a huge lesson. Like, there’s more than 808s in the universe.

I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.

I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.

You can physically move yourself around but there’s that great line that Adam wrote: “Does it define for life, like print of thumb?” I think it does.

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 don’t want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I’m doing.

Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it’s overcompensating for something missing in the song’s structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it’s never like an assault.

Adam is one of my favourite writers, period. He has such a unique voice and he’s somebody who I admire so much for putting the effort into inventing his own language and furthering it.

It’s the risk takers that move the human race forward.

America’s a melting pot, all races, cultures, religious choices.

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

I am sort of anti-hunting. I don’t put down what anyone wants to do, but it seems to me that killing a creature for fun is not a progressive idea.

You see all races in music, and in dance and theatre, so why can’t we see it in fashion?

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we’re evolving as a race.

We are going as fast as we can as soon as we can. We’re in a race against time, until we run out of money.

Weak mortals, chained to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods, you unfortunate race, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow, the illusion of a dream.