It's the ones without scars - those are the people you have to watch out for.

I'm making music for music's sake, and I have an audience I'm proud of.

I learned so much about music by playing this little, miniature songwriting machine [ukulele], especially about melody. The motto is less strings more melody.

I don't need drugs to make my life tragic.

If at noon you sit down and there's just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn't exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There's something empowering about that.

I realized in the early days I just didn't edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque.

I'm not a college graduate, but I don't know how George W.Bush could have truly believed that the flower of democracy was going to blossom in that part of the world, I mean Iraq - at least in part because the governments there are so tied to religion .