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."

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

One of the big challenges I've thought about in making record is that the role of computers has become so inescapable and computers offer so many possibilities for creativity, but they also make you lazy.

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 don't have to forego education to do anything. Even if you want to go to the NBA, you should read.

I want the ethic of being independent and open-minded, having a lot of integrity, intellectually, to be part of anything I do.

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.