It's hard to see how much of our social fabric is made up of a radical refusal to love people.

What I'm confessing is that I've grown to a point where I feel like I should have more answers, and I don't. And I still think that applies in the George Saunders stuff.

Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the technology obsession.

In Dardenne brothers' films is a really small kind of humanity. It's not like the titanic "humanity" of humanism, it's much more gritty and realistic. But again, humanity is what unites all the people I'm talking about, and in such different ways. The humanity is in that moment you glimpse someone and have a completely intimate moment with them, and that intimacy is connected to an extreme pathetic aspect.

I've come to realize that most of my intellectual postures and a lot of my intellectualism is super defensive and really symptomatic of basic fears. My one thing with the record is that I wanted to make something alien that wasn't alienating. And I think that the last thing I want is to dedicate my life to something which renders me further and further from being at home in my life - progressively more alienated and separate from myself.

Traveling is amazing. You meet so many great, positive people. You get to see new faces all the time. I don't think that loneliness, it's not like you have no one in your life. Well, I'd say it's like . . . you can have everyone you need in your life and still be lonely. Everyone knows that. Being on the road is complicated and shitty; it's also really, really rad.

I'm cool with being the sad guy, but I don't want to be the guy who nobody wants around because he's so miserable.