I want people to listen to my lyrics and be okay with themselves. The people who have it the roughest are homosexuals who come out of the closet.

A lot of 18-year-olds are like old men. They think they've seen everything.

I think alcohol is a good drug for me when I'm writing. I don't think I've ever had a problem with it. I can stop for a few weeks, so I think it's okay. I don't think it's good for my liver, but I do love it. It's a huge part of my life, and it makes me happy.

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.

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.

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.

The piano is just a different animal. It's expensive, it's big, it's heavy, and it doesn't fit in the mix easily. Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible - it wasn't an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.