I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.

"A meteor hits planet Earth" - that's a story idea but that doesn't give me any indication of what the character is.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.