The press is like any business. Its a group of really intelligent individuals that ends up being one slathering, one-eyed, drooling monster.

With a song, it only takes a couple of minutes to go back to the beginning and try it again to see if it works. The novel freaks me out because, what if you get into the eighth chapter and think, 'Let's go to the top and see if this works again? It's going to take me three weeks.' I'm in awe of that.

I feel like a quote out of context, withholding the rest so I can be for you what you want to see.

My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric.

The nice thing about age is worrying less and less about what people think.

It's a tough thing to know that when you're making your album, you're going to end up collaborating with, say, Wal-Mart, on your artwork. That just sucks. And the pressure behind getting the numbers real fast is, to me, dizzying.

I used to do this big rant at the end of some gigs with Ben Folds Five. The band broke into this big heavy metal thing and I started as a joke to scream in a heavy metal falsetto. I found myself saying things like: Feel my pain, I am white, feel my pain.