Sometimes I feel very young, and other times I feel like the side of a ship that's got a bunch of layers of mussels and barnacles on it.

Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression.

When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.

I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday, and you're 17 years old.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

The way the vocal folds work is that they can get inflamed and in pain, but actual tears in the folds are somewhat rare. I've never torn anything. Been too strained plenty of times.

I think, taking too long to work on a record, you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour, and I write, and I write.

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.

I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.

I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.

For me, moving is always a big opportunity. It's just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

Wrestling's a form of expression, and it expresses vastness.

Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It's got value, and it takes your time, and it's useful to people, depending.

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.