We are occupants. No one has any lasting purchase on life or on the planet.

The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture.

One person's roar is another's whine, just as one person's music is another's unendurable noise.

We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don't. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.

If I'm jetlagging, and I've missed some meals, and it gets to that point in a movie that you're supposed to cry, I'll let my defences down from around my inherent standing level of cynicism, and I'll cry.

I'm always looking, people are always presenting and I have found that every year of my life there's been great bands. All over the world, all the time. So when someone goes, "Music sucks now!" I'll go, "I don't think so. Not over at my house."

Trying to write music, be in a band and keep it all happening is one of the hardest, morale-destroying, heartbreaking things you will ever try to do - and that's when it's going well.