If you're standing in the middle of a ring and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.

Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.

As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

In the present political situation, it's an interesting phenomenon to look at: what is the appeal of an autocratic leader? Why do people want somebody who yells at them? For most of us, that's so hard to understand. Who wants that? I think there are a lot of people for whom that fulfills some kind of need.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.