The most horrifying thing I ever did was work as a steward on an airplane. I wanted to get hired by United. I thought, 'With my languages, this will be amazing; I will work in First Class.' But I could only get a job with an airline going from Newark, New Jersey to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

I've kept most of my friends for decades, and I continue to make new friends.

The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy.

My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.

Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.

I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That's kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I'm not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn't think. My feminism is for me.

For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.

I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.

Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going.

Wrestlers give their bodies to their work. I don't know if I like the word 'crazy' here. What I would say is there are people who have a different relationship to their bodies than most people.

Songs are often character studies.

I know the Bible pretty well. I'm not one of those guys who can immediately start quoting every book, but usually I know where to look to find certain themes.

Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.

People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

You get this really cool groove when you're playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone's sort of feeling each other's space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true, and everyone's sort of sitting in their own pocket. It's kind of jazz-like.

People think of me as a nice person because, I think, I have grown into a nice person.

To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.

To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.

Something I've learned being in this industry for so long is that if you want to work with somebody, call them up. Very few musicians have any illusions about genre boundaries. They are useful descriptive terms, but they don't really bind musicians.

A song is fire. You react to it primally, instantly. You don't have to decide whether you like it, and you don't really have to sit down and think about it much after you're done listening to it. It really does run through you like wind.

I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because... I don't want to use the word 'tribal,' but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to.