I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be.

I felt so liberated when I first saw Charles Mee’s 'The Glory of the World' at BAM play, because for me this is the gateway to contemplation, or this is the gateway to love, or this is the gateway to faith, not sitting and reading a book by an isolated monk, god bless him. This is.

Making money is awesome and fun as hell, but they're saying, "Well, you're offered a whole lot of money to do this," and it's like, well, I do want the money, but I don't really do that - like headline a big festival or something like that. I could go there and do that, but it isn't really what I do. It feels weird to me.

Writing songs is a profession; so it's not an attempt to take things from my interactions with other people and for some reason give them to a total stranger to listen to. I find it offensive to hear other people do that.

You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.

To me, recordings are little fourth-dimension artifacts, because they already are representatives of past, present, and future, just inherently in their existence.

I make the songs and part of making them is singing them. But what you hear is not me. It's the song. It's through me.