From an early age, I knew I would be unhappy if I wasn't doing something creative.

I'm not trained in music.

I'm not, like, a natural performer. It's sort of a thing that I've had to learn to do.

Music is a religion to me and my friends.

If you look at the way people behave at shows, icons are now musicians; they are the people that we worship.

There are a lot of musicians I've met on Twitter where it was like, 'Hey, I like your music' - and then I ended up meeting them and it turned into a friendship.

If you tell someone you're doing something innovative, they'll think you're doing something innovative.

I want to make an a cappella record to release for free.

Fashion can be a really powerful tool, but it's also a place where you can be totally humiliated and have your power taken from you.

I think if you're good at art, you'll be good at most types of art.

I can tell really early on in a painting if I'm going to toss it or not.

I'm actually not a particularly negative person, but I feel like most things are better when they're not actualized. The motivation that comes from wanting something is so much more driving of people than actually getting it.

Especially with music, people want confidence.

I love a lot of very sentimental music, but I shouldn't necessarily be the person who makes it.

Success, for me, is a song that can deliver shivers.

The thing is, I really like working. If I sit around too much, I get really bad anxiety.

I don't think I know anyone who has a steady job in Montreal.

I'm a very unhealthy person, and Montreal is very cold, and I'm usually sick when I'm there.

You rarely find someone who sings really well and who produces really well; it's a problem, and I just think it's a missing link in the music scene.

I like performing, but I usually get really sick when I'm on tour, and it's just hard.

You want people to hate you. If you're just making people happy, you're like Mumford & Sons.

I get offers to do huge-budget music videos with big production companies all the time, but I have no interest.

Most of my music videos were made for under $200.

My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

We want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.

Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease.

I think it's very important to always make sure that you're talking to the entire coalition and to as many Americans as possible; not to go chasing after one little group or another. The Democrats would bring new groups into their party and not notice that larger groups are going out the back door.

The job of the government isn't to go around and try and make people sacrifice, it's to try and make people free. The reason why we have a national defense is to protect our freedoms.

The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.

The question is: How do we reduce spending from 25% of GDP, which is where Obama put us? The focus is on total government spending. Can we bring it down, in a reasonable and politically acceptable way? That's what the Paul Ryan plan does. It puts us on a gradual reform path to reducing the size of government.

Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.

The welfare state creates its own victim/client constituency. By making individuals free and independent, we reduce the need for 'charity' to those truly needy citizens what we can certainly afford to help through real charity.

It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

If the Republican Party works with the Hispanic community, the immigrant community, they're natural allies. People who came to this country are more freedom-loving and more American than people who just happened to be born here.

Spending an extra dollar on the D.C. public school system isn't spending an extra dollar on education. Spending an extra dollar with the Pentagon doesn't buy you an extra dollar on defense. Republicans need to look skeptically at military spending.

Most Republicans have made it very clear they're not interested in raising taxes. They want to reform government.

The central issue of our time - of all times - is the size, power and scope of government.

Government should enforce rule of law. It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.

There's no reason to raise taxes. Taxes should be lower... The problem we have is that government spends too much, not that taxes are too low.

Income should be taxed one time at one rate, not again and again.

Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith. And because the Democratic Party was taken over by the aggressive secular guys, they became hostile not just to conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians, but Orthodox Jews and Muslims and Mormons.

I run a taxpayer group - the most powerful guy in D.C., nonsense. OK? There are buildings with thousands of people in them, all lobbying for more spending and higher levels of spending and more government commitments. And there are a handful - a handful of groups that fight for less spending.

The future of the Republican Party, all the different folks looking to lead the Republican Party at the national level in the future, recognize we should do immigration reform.

We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

If you feel the government should leave you alone, you're a Republican. If you think the job of the government is to go push people around and take things for you, then you're a Democrat.

There are several reasons to oppose tax increases. First, every dollar of tax increase is a dollar you didn't get in spending restraint. Two, if you walk into the Democrats' Andrews-Air-Force-Base, Lucy-with-the-Football trick for the third time in a row - they don't have have a saying for being fooled three times!

If you raise taxes, it won't reduce the deficit. The other team will simply spend the resources.

My wife and I have what's known as mixed marriage. I am a Methodist, she is a Muslim. So we're keeping it in the M's.