I've come to appreciate how special a song is compared to other art forms, because you can carry it around in your head and your heart, and it remains part of you. It just comes as natural as a bird to me, always did. It's the way singer-songwriters make sense of our lives.

The respect for a musical score must come from the director... If the director has no power and has to surrender to budgetary constraints, this is where we have the problem.

I'm a singer, not a politician, and I think you don't want the two to get confused. It's not OK to be on CNN talking about people starving and then tell the interviewer that your new album is coming out in six months.

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It's psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I'm always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate.

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.