I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

The idea of starting a band because of Nirvana and thereby trying to sound like Nirvana is totally not the case.

I don't really get a lot of clarity in my everyday life and my interactions with people. Most things that happen to me aren't very straightforward. They're either vastly confusing, or I realize that I'm inventing whatever meaning I'm deriving from whatever happens and it's filtering through my own indulgent perspective.

If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.

If you're an artist, you do what you do, and in a way, you don't even control the core essence of what you do. You try to mold it and develop a style, but the core elements of what you do are just part of who you are.

In an artistic and spiritual sense I'm really not that concerned about what happens after the album is done.

You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career.