You feel the weight of the world and you take things in and you are acting out from a place of being pushed and visceral. It's heavy. You can't be there all of the time.

With all of the people in the world and all of the suffering and all of the things that people are forced to do for lack of other alternative, the fact that I had a subsidized education and got to go right into a life of playing music for a living, what a stupidly fortunate place to be.

I had a rule that I would never force the muse in my younger days. I would follow the feeling. I would just put the pen down and walk away, and wait for it to come back. But these days, I have a kid, I tour a lot, and I'm always short on time.

I think books are just a great ticket to get you outside of yourself. You can not be you for a second and live in the shoes of a character, which is a special thing.

I grew up with a rotary phone in my house and that seems a world away, but that's what I was used to as a kid. So now things seem complicated to me, but to kids born right now, they don't feel complicated.

More than anything, being an English major made me more appreciative of authors and what an incredible feat it is to just finish a novel, let alone a really brilliant one.

I think the future and the past are equally hypothetical.