I think the question that nobody wanted to deal with is the question they're posing: did my kid die in vain? Because the answer is too awful.

God must have something to do with joy ... and with sadness.

It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true: A song chooses me. I don't go looking for a certain kind of lyric. It kind of develops its own little arc and I'll just see what happens.

We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.

In other words, it is what I do in the world that matters. When I traveled for three months in the Mideast, the places I wanted to go back to were Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It has to do with what Gandhi said: he found God in the eyes of the poor. Those are the places which were so moving that they were just unbearable.