I want to have freedom of thought and expression - not get beaten down into some corporate existence, where there's so much risk of embracing the truth that you feel like you can't do it.

I'm not the guy whose gonna shoot 10,000 free-throws until I'm Michael Jordan - and it did happen kind of accidentally that I said, "Okay, yeah, I'll try singing."

To leverage those things that are common to everybody, and to present them in a way that's sort of naked, is more courageous in art than constantly trying to be evasively too cool.

I'm not a super prolific creator, I don't make stuff everyday, and I don't have a soundtrack constantly playing in my head. I think I had years and years of pent-up aesthetic ideas that I wanted to express.

If you want to be taken seriously, you almost have to act really serious.

In a certain respect, in a movie, you inevitably have a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs because that's the only practical way to get it done. When you make a record, you can still be an auteur, because you can make a whole record without anyone's help if you want.

You can't use irony as a way of disengaging with the difficult or emotional aspects of life.