I was a kid, and I was very excited to experience this whole new world. And everything was fun, everything from, oh, wow, we get bananas - I'd only seen them in picture books, you know - to, like, the diversity of the neighborhood and to explore Judaism for the first time. It was really hushed in the Soviet Union.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

I think that you have to let yourself be agitated and annoyed and not be fully comfortable.

There's something about trying to know when you really need to protect yourself, or else you're not going to get anything done, and sometimes to be really uncomfortable or agitated or annoyed or bored. Boredom is so important.

Part of you just has to be in service of processing things and getting them out.