“I don’t leave my neighborhood. I don’t go anywhere. There are four blocks I live in and there are two coffee shops, one at each end of the block… so I don’t do much driving…”

I think a lot of good directors listen to music while they’re working. The songs just don’t become a part of the film. They’re replaced.

The nature of honesty is that if someone has information or knows something about you that you don’t want heard, then they have power over you.

My parents told me I must get married. I was seen as a failure if I didn’t do it.

I think people use temp music quite a bit, but the people who write the temp music don’t ever really learn that their music was inspiring a movie.

And all I really want to say is you’re the reason I want to stay.

When someone really goes to tell you something about what they’re thinking, they’re going to wear that experience with them. That’s what you have to share.

I do have that mindset – that most good art comes from some turmoil, from someone trying to come to some equilibrium, or come up and get a breath.

I drink a lot, probably too much. My scene while writing lyrics is always a bottle of scotch and stacks of note cards, pencil and pencil sharpener. I throw around note cards and drink.

People aren’t going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They’d rather just have the martini.

Everything I write is personal, really. Even when I’m sarcastic, it’s quite personal. And on this record, from the production to the singing to the performances, I got it really honest.

If I’m in a relationship and my girlfriend is sleeping with other people, I don’t need to know who it is; I just want to know how she feels about it.

I start songs all the time. If I weren’t so lazy, I would finish them. It’s like when I have a deadline I have to.

I divorce myself from listeners who aren’t tolerant of humor. I did notice universally that, especially when it comes to weight, people look in the mirror and get the angle just right, tell themselves it’s all right, and then they go out.

But I really do have a soft spot for the solo shows. Any musician who writes and sings will tell you that’s the center of it, that is it. It’s almost like there’s something church-like about it and you gotta go back there, if you’re a songwriter that sings your material.

I’m not really a strange person or anything, so if there’s music I like, usually there’s other people who like it too.

In many ways, I’ve chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don’t like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.

I like that Pilates compromises the mind and body. It’s not just about being able to run around the block a few times.

Everybody was happy my brother was locked up.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.

It ain’t made for everybody, but I knocked a lot of blocks down.

I didn’t do any of the crimes that the man two blocks over at the White House is responsible for.

Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, “Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!”

We need to block out the outside world; we need to disbelieve anything that would doubt us, because everyone will doubt us if we allow them that space.

When we are in our studios, in our private space.