I think having a coach or an editor or whatever the novelist's producer is could help. If you finish a chapter and you turn it in to him, and he or she said, "That was pretty good, it might go better." Maybe that's what I'll try to find.

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America / Have such a sad time together.

It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.

In the end, when you're writing a really good song, it strikes the right tone.

You can either go to the gym because you want to lose weight, or you can go to the gym because you like how it makes you feel when you're running.

I can still sing most Eagles songs, even though I never bought a record and never liked the band.

I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully.