I don't work so hard at trying to get every song to be three-dimensional and mean so much. I just want to breathe, right now, with the music.

Your pot laws are great! But your gun laws are even better!

I didn't respond to the kind of sarcastic tone. It felt like some of the Sarah Palin speech was written as though it were a Saturday Night Live newscast. Maybe that's because she looks very similar . . . She's got her Tina Fey thing going.

I think a lot of things are written from experience, but then you become a writer and talk about other people's experience and you tell stories. I mean, you can't just tell your own story all the time.

I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices - they were about my age, but they were doing it.

Darkness comes in waves...tell me, why invite it to stay?

It seems like every time I start to feel good, something really awful happens. It's like... it's really terrible.