When I read War and Peace in Norway, really far away from humanity for a long time, it was such an amazing, affirming blast of "humanity" in all forms. It totally cracked my mind-nut open and rainbows shot out. I loved humanity and being alive, rather than wanting to bury my head in the snow.

Nirvana really touched me as a teenager and started making me pay attention to music as a participatory thing that I could do. Music that you want to throw your body into it - that's a feeling that I'm not quite satisfied with having made yet.

I learned how to sit on the couch in front of the fire and read a magazine, just for like eight hours a day, every day. It was... crazy.

I really like looking at other people's book collections when I'm at someone's house. I think it is an amazing cross section of a person's brain and lifestyle. I think everyone should photograph their book spines and make a website. Seriously.

I wanted to lift the aspects of the lyrics and imagery that I found sincerely powerful and touching, plus the amazing musical extremities, and make my own thing. That's what making music has always been for me. Synthesizing a nonexistent kind of music that I wish existed because I wanted to listen to it.

When someone close to you dies, the line is shifted really drastically about what is meaningful and what isn't.

All things in the world are singing a song, reciting a poem, inaudibly, to their surroundings, to the things they encounter.