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.

People will complain that they don't want to wait around for lightning to strike, but why not? If you invest yourself in chance, the potential for disappointment is pretty low.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

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.