When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.

As you get older as an animal on the planet, you want to get a little more comfortable, you want to get cozier.

Love what you have and you'll have more love.

You're using your headphones to drown out your mind

Most of the time I don't even talk about any direct lineage of songs, because I feel like it just chains them down into my own consciousness, and the whole fun of them is being able to live in others' consciousness.

Tomorrow you might get a phone call about something wonderful and you might get a phone call about something terrible.

You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.