“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...”

“I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated t...”

“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.”

“Nothing forces us to knowWhat we do not want to knowExcept pain”

“Doesn't it seem that it is always by chance that these things happen, or is it because of the generosity of a shared knowledge of suffering that allows for it?”

“Wisdom is not making life any harder than it has to be.”

“Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them ...”

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.”