“The late ’90s were a really bad time for people trying to be rock stars, you know what I mean? It seemed like everyone was a one-hit wonder on the radio.”

Bands who are in their early 20s today, they are living in their own time and they have a series of parameters they have to work around.

I’ve covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don’t think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.

I don’t want to be overly dramatic and say it’s the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go.

I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real. And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd.

Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.

I’m a war of head versus heart, it’s always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say.

When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record.

If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it’s that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.

Now that we have the resources, we’re like, “Oh wow, a nice studio is pretty nice! They do have nice outboards here. It’s actually a pretty good place.” It’s funny how much changes so quickly.

I can remember how I sang – a little more nasal-y back then. Listening to those old recordings is like seeing a photograph of yourself from 10 years ago. You’re wearing what you thought looked cool at the time. You had your hair styled the particular way you thought looked cool.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla’s bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, “Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play.”

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

We had friends who had a hit single on the radio and sold 500,000 records, and then they couldn’t get arrested a year later.

I wonder what I was thinking when I was trying to say a particular thing. I hear some of the weird little nuances in the recording; I can hear what the room sounded like. I remember what it smelled like.

Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

This guy Clubber Lang, I’ve been him all my life. He’s mean and hungry just like me.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Remember, weapons of mass destruction don’t mean missiles.

I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.

You can tell on-stage when a joke’s starting to lose its pop. It doesn’t mean people don’t want to hear it anymore; it means I don’t want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they’ve never heard.

There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.

In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.