The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable.

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.

I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.

I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.

The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks.