If I'm walking down the street and someone stops me and says, "Oh! A song that you wrote meant a lot to me, and I listened to it after I went to my sister's funeral," that's when it hits me.

The average life expectancy of a celebrity is 20 years less than someone working in a coal mine.

When I was a drunk, New York was the greatest place in the world. You walk everywhere, everything is open until four in the morning, and people go to New York looking for debauchery.

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 think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.

One of the main reasons I'm vegan is because I'm ethically lazy. My friends who eat meat or who eat eggs have to sometimes wrestle with the ethical consequences of their actions. By being vegan, I take the easy way out.

I don't want to get too nuanced, but we have the electoral college in the United States and that means we don't have direct democracy.