A novel is a performance you have to plan.

The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

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.

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.

Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.

I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously.