“Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.”

I think people are born bisexual, and it’s just that our parents and society kind of veer us off into this feeling of ‘Oh, I can’t’. They say it’s taboo. It’s ingrained in our heads that it’s bad, when it’s not bad at all. It’s a very beautiful thing.

I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It’s fragile. I don’t have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.

I played St. Jimmy on Broadway I sort of caught the acting bug. But I didn’t want to go full-bore into it because I have a lot to learn.

That’s where all good music comes from, I think – anything that’s likely to have an impact on pop culture comes from a point where there’s no expectation of it becoming anything other than personal.

‎The day you become old is the day you’re not looking for new experiences anymore.

I don’t want to live in an ivory tower, being the songwriter who just turns inward.

The bigger the risks, the better off you are. Otherwise you’re just boring.

Making mistakes is a lot better than not doing anything.

I heard Davey Havok has a brand of eyeliner out now… its AFI-liner

There’s an honesty in our family – my kids and I are able to talk about things without me putting the fear of God into them.

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class.

I think that the character actually really loves where he’s at, in his life. He’s just trying to have it make a little bit more sense while he figures out what he actually wants to do with it.

I just plug in and let go.

I have no idea where my career is going. I just make the best music that I possibly can.

Every night I play as if my life depends on it.

I thought everybody was in on the joke. But I was the joke.

Are there any religions on your list that include the slaughter of noblemen as a holy duty?

I had about the biggest, longest wish list anyone could have, and 99 percent of what I wanted to get on the screen we got on the screen within our schedule and within our budget and within our resources.

I love the way a list makes a big hodgepodge of things simmer down and behave.

My theory is that, just like with omitting a final comma in a list when not essential for meaning, publishers are trying to save paper and ink or pixels on-screen.

[On being a judge for the 1986 Booker Prize:] I got to the point where I couldn’t read a laundry list without considering it for the Booker Prize.

I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.