I'm actually on the Twitter like all those crazy young kids are, and if I'm going to do an in-store appearance or I post something on my website, I tweet these followers, a word I don't like so much, and over 50,000 people go, like, 'Okay, I got it.'

I want my fellow citizens to wise up and stop falling for [war]. I try with my limited access, I'm not getting into Kabul with a camera, they're not letting me get into Benghazi with a camera. I do what I can with my flimsy American passport and a visa. The photos are a bit more heavy from Southern Sudan and Haiti and Cuba.

To see change in your own area code is very powerful. There's a little orphanage down the street from my company, and we donate $1 from the sale of each CD we sell to the orphanage.

If I were a doctor, I would prescribe that you addict yourself deeply and irrevocably to music and never, ever seek cure outside of more music. It really is the best drug available.

I have come to regard November as the older, harder man's October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer's death as winter tightens its grip.

I live my life by the numbers. Not only am I an American, I am an Americanist.

Youth is fleeting and life is short, you might as well strike hard. Anything else is just average.