"I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness."

"There definitely isn't a structure anymore to how I get ideas. A lot of times I'll just write down a phrase, or I'll have an idea that's attached to just a few chords. Other times, it's work."

"I like things that reach a little further and are a little more abstract, but I don't think that's what I do naturally well. How I write naturally is probably what's furthest from me, and the most removed from what I understand."

"It sounds like I'm channeling or something, and I don't really fully understand what it is. I'll get a piece of paper and write down what I think is coming to me. And I'll play it once. Whether it's being recorded or not, I can then usually remember it for a sometimes shocking amount of time."

"Most of my songs are pretty sketchy. There's not a lot of bass sections. I don't write big bridges. Sometimes I'll try. But it's hard for me to focus that way, because I always think it's more interesting to just see what will happen next."

"Being a rock musician is already like ego-tripping hardcore. You're self-consumed, and you're always thinking. It's really easy to say, "I'm going to write a song about this situation, and when I'm done, everyone will care." To everybody else, that's ego-tripping."

"There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas."

"A lot of the songs I write are like songs that I've never been able to find on any record, but that I've always wanted to hear. Or maybe in a style I already loved, but I was looking for something in it that I wasn't hearing yet."