Most of the time, feelings just seem to get in the way. They're a luxury for the idle, a bourgeois concept. Feelings are overrated.

The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don't have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all.

I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.

I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.

In getting older, I find myself becoming progressively more ineffectual in a lot of different ways, and part of that is down to no longer having the youthful feeling that what you're doing has any true impact.

Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you're pushed to the limit constantly.

That's what we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different.