What's scary is the unknown, the stuff you can't put your finger on.

I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much. Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority. I couldn't name more than a couple of good drum'n'bass acts, and I have no idea what's big in the dance world right now.

My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.

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.

As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like.

If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It's not an intellectual process.