I imagine that I'm less famous than the 15th ranked bowler in the world.

Like they used to say about Joe Montana, he threw soft because he couldn't throw hard. He was successful because he didn't try to do what he couldn't. I couldn't rock out harder than everybody, or overpower people with mastery like Jack White of the White Stripes, so why try? That's why I've always worked harder on words.

If they told me I couldn't leave the radius of six miles from my house, I really wouldn't care. There's nowhere I really want to go.

I used to consider myself weak.

It must be very strange to live in the world of Willie Nelson or Bruce Springsteen or Pearl Jam. I don't know what kind of handle they have on their own loss of talent.

Pragmatism and romance are sort of opposites.

For the first 12 years of recording I would finish the album, then on the day it came out I'd never hear the songs again.

When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.

Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.

The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

I'm not convinced I have fans.

My great grandfather was the last practicing Jew in my family. He died in 1982.

I guess on all Silver Jews records, it's extremely male-centric.

I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.

My father is a despicable man.

When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.

All my songs were made at the end of the neck, 'farmer's corner' chords.

I've never done much to try to build an audience.

I'm not the type to demand affirmation or to worry that I'll be forgotten. I'm more the type to dare the world to forget me.

I always had a background belief in God. In other words, instinctually I've never doubted that we are not alone.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

In my whole life, I've had maybe 10 people who have told me how much my music means to them.

I try every day and every night to find a movie or a TV show that I can watch, but I just can't make it past ten minutes of anything.

I made records for 20 years, I lived off it. But people would say I made so many mistakes, I did so many things you're not supposed to do. I had a band name nobody could say. I didn't play live. I never practiced, I never got better at my instrument.

Sometimes I turn the TV just below where you can hear it and write down what I think they might be saying by the mumbles and rhythms.

I read Henry Miller's 'Nexus,' 'Sexus' and 'Plexus' the summer after I graduated from college. It cemented my decision to spurn any and all careers.

Some people like my singing. But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people.

In the beginning, because of the Pavement thing, we were able to sell a certain amount of records. We were able to sell not such a great amount of records, but enough to live on. So there was no incentive to do what didn't come naturally.

I hear luxury brand names, I cringe.

I don't have room in my mind to think about musical equipment.

In 2004, I don't think any Silver Jews fan was probably expecting another record.

You don't meet too many actors in Nashville.

All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter.

I trust myself.

I think reporters think that they can get something extra out of a person face-to-face, but in reality people just give stock answers because there's a social situation going on.

I have bad vision, but it's not distorted. It's low power!

In an email... like I did 100 interviews, and I never repeated one story. That's impossible to do when you do face-to-face interviews, because your brain locks and you say the same thing over and over again.

If critics were harder on the musicians that they love, there would be better songs. But as they grow older and they lose their talent, critics refuse to let them know that and protect them, and they get to the point where they put out music that just isn't up to the levels where they've already been.

When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

My whole life I've tried to find the thing I can do that other people can't do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.

I was much further along as a poet than as a songwriter, but the songs were getting more attention. They were doing what art is supposed to do, mixing it up with people.

I bought a guitar when I was twenty. But I didn't write a song until I was 25 or 26. I never learned to play others songs. I learned to play my own songs while I was learning how to make them better.

I've never been from a certain group. I've always reserved a space for myself where I'm unattached to any group, but the part of Judaism that I really take away, that means something to me, is the part about community.

Bobby Braddock is great.

I grew up the son of a businessman. And I didn't get into music to be a businessman.

Natalie Maines has a voice for the centuries.

I always loved bands with mystique.

I heard Springsteen was an unhappy person. I don't know, I haven't read his biography. But a lot of people in my field should be a lot more unhappy than they are.