When I have just sat down and tried to write the lyrics of a song, usually about half of it sounds like bullshit. I just have to go away from something and come back to it again later. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

You gotta lean towards the things that make you like yourself. Forget everything else.

A person with grace is somebody who's socially graceful or is a classy person, but sometimes you just feel the opposite of that, and you just feel like a jerk and a loser and a weirdo.

There are records that you just sink into. They coincide with what you’re going through and become an ally. If our records do that for people, that’s the greatest compliment I could ever receive. That’s one of the reasons making music is so important to me, because there’s a very strange emotional reach. For me—more than books or movies or other things—music is like a mainline to your heart.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.

I have pit bulls barking at me on half of the love songs.