I was much further along as a poet than as a songwriter, but the songs were getting more attention. They were doing what art is supposed to do, mixing it up with people.

I bought a guitar when I was twenty. But I didn't write a song until I was 25 or 26. I never learned to play others songs. I learned to play my own songs while I was learning how to make them better.

I've never been from a certain group. I've always reserved a space for myself where I'm unattached to any group, but the part of Judaism that I really take away, that means something to me, is the part about community.

Bobby Braddock is great.

I grew up the son of a businessman. And I didn't get into music to be a businessman.

Natalie Maines has a voice for the centuries.

I always loved bands with mystique.

I heard Springsteen was an unhappy person. I don't know, I haven't read his biography. But a lot of people in my field should be a lot more unhappy than they are.

I can't imagine putting my name on a t-shirt. For someone to wear my name? Me? It's ridiculous.

I don't have time for language poetry anymore. I don't want to throw people off anymore.

For a long time, I've struggled very, very much with what people call treatment-resistant depression.

The world of commerce is a kind of a purgatory itself.

Yeah, once the song is written, it just complexifies the profile of it to have the music and the words at odds. It comes naturally to me. A lot of my music is like that.

I don't have any desire to be in a relationship with anyone else, and I do feel like I'm on the other side of my career of being a Lothario.

In the beginning, it was meant to be like a faceless art piece. Then I did the first record and it received enough notice to satisfy my needs. I questioned the procedure out of fear. The Silver Jews was never meant to be recreated live.

I was 29 or 30 when I felt sure of what I was doing, but not fully identifying as a songwriter until I was 37.

If I believed in fate I'd be very curious why I picked the name Silver Jews.

Intellectuals and creative people, once they start talking about God they get put into this other category: 'I don't go to people's music like that to understand my life.'

Lyrically, country music is the most satisfying music for me.

Allen Ginsburg was wrong about a lot of things, but especially when he said, 'First thought, best thought.'

I was not born to be the center of attention in a crowded room.

I believe that intermittent live performance has cut short the writing lives of touring musicians.

The greatest thing about Nashville is that it's welcoming.

Nashville only thrives when talented people from out of town move here from somewhere else.

My only advice would be to someone right now, is if you're in a position in your life where you need to make a change, this is the best time.

I take pride in the fact that I can walk away from things. My willingness to walk away has protected me, I realize that now. Being able to walk away from sessions, from poetry, from dreams of being a poetry professor.

I'm not a good singer.

I don't have religion or culture. I don't have anything I can believe in when I'm really scared. When I play the songs, I feel the fear disappear.

It's a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers' expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.

I want so many artists that I care about to go away and grow up, and have been amazed at how hard that is for some people to do.

I've never been a big movie person, but I used to watch movies regularly in my life, and sometime in the '90s I just stopped. I certainly never was an educated moviegover.

That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.

I don't think any songwriter who comes up through playing clubs can really claim to have independently developed their art. All along the way so much information is coming, the writer inside the performer unconsciously reacts to all of that. By the time they get to be thirty, the writer is gone.

Fan reaction is so out-sized and hyperbolic in rock music compared to other arts.

I ask myself when I see a new album: 'Is this an album that they needed to make, or do they need to just keep making albums?'

I guess when I was younger, I'd have assumed that in 2008 music would be full of great writers following in the tradition of the young great writers of the '60s and '70s, but it hasn't turned out that way, or at least there are no other writers around that I look at and think: 'Wow, I'm outclassed, I need to get out of this business.'

When people tend to be happier they have more interest in the world around them.

There are enough really good love songs and I don't even know if I could write one if I tried.

Mostly i write on an unplugged Mustang or a Baby Taylor.

I have this Martin electric/acoustic that's made of black formica. Really cool.

Obviously there was the idea that we could sell more records if we played live, but I guess I didn't care enough to sell more records to do that.

A lot of the Jews I met in Israel, almost all of them are secular. They get turned off by their religion, in the same way that Americans get turned off Christianity by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

I still believe in putting something out and not asking people to buy the record, then buy a ticket to my show and then buy a t-shirt and then a, like, copy of the show they just saw on CD. That's undignified to me.

The songs of mine that don't work, the ones that I wouldn't consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It's not that they fail because they're boring, but because they overreach.

Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.

The overlap between Pavement's fan base and people who liked Silver Jews was total. In my mind, even a local band with 20 fans had more unqualified support.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

People younger than me trust me. People my age do not. They think I'm up to something. And I've often felt this.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always felt un-trusted.

When I started the band, the name 'Silver Jews' had no literal meaning - it was just an abstraction.