“When you say 'failure,' that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that hel...”

“A part of me wants to sort of try and sound cool and feed this myth that I'm some sort of glamorous lothario, but I was raised by women - my mother and her mother and my aunts - and as a result, mo...”

“A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the...”

“At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because...”

“If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.”

“Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”

“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”

“Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate ...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”