There are a lot of public figures who, before they take a stand on a issue, they talk about it with their publicist and they figure out how it's going to affect record sales. Life is really too short to worry about that sort of thing.

I was never encouraged to believe anything. I was brought up in a profoundly agnostic or pantheistic community.

The good thing about working alone is I get a lot done and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work.

Intellectually, human beings and animals may be different, but it's pretty obvious that animals have a rich emotional life and that they feel joy and pain. It's easy to forget the connection between a hamburger and the cow it came from. But I forced myself to acknowledge the fact that every time I ate a hamburger, a cow had ceased to breathe

I'm obsessed with politics, and I talk about it any chance I can get. I have strong opinions about how the world should be run.

I have to say that being a vegan in 1986 or whenever was a lot different than being a vegan in 2012. You'd go to health foods stores and basically your choice was between Mung beans and nutritional yeast, and that's about it.

It's heartbreaking that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are desperate for the right to vote, but here in America people stay home on election day.