The secret is planning your work and working your plan. If you don't know where you are going, how will you know when you arrive? You can't stumble upon your destination.

I never wanted to play guitar when I was younger. I wanted to be a drummer because everybody plays guitar, and I didn't want to do what everybody else wanted to do.

We don't have to live up to the expectations of others. Passion is personal. As long as our passion is fueled with the right stuff then keep on plodding forward. I'll never be Mark Twain or Tom Clancy. But that's okay, because neither of them could teach you to mix a boundless number of grays, or where to place the catch light in a portrait.

It seemed like there was no control over it. I think certain things just popped. God was blessing us in telling us that certain things were going the way they were supposed to go.

There are distractions, all around. There's so much media, for a young kid to battle against, to get to something soulful. You have to make a decision, on your own, what you can take from these people, if you can dig deeper. It's nice to be able to let people dig deeper.

I can't imagine being anything creative in a major town because everybody's doing the same exact thing you're doing. How can you not get confused about what you yourself are doing?

I think that most people, and by people I mean journalists, think that I pre-conceive everything and that I spend my afternoons dreaming up self-mythologizing points of interest.