We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

I like the sounds of real, living, breathing musicians. When a real person plays something, there's a soul. They're giving you their emotions.

I'm not the kind of person who works 24 hours a day, mostly out of laziness; I don't know.

For me, growing-up music was always about telling stories.

The Internet's a crazy place to hang out because it's insane to see so many people doing so many creative things all over the map.

There are a lot of guys who do this job, and they have tons of assistants. They all kind of write together, and for me, it's basically me here in this room, and that's it.

I think Mozart, with all his impatience in writing, would have loved it. It would have allowed him to write twice as much. He would have loved a Mac. If he'd had a laptop, he would have been unstoppable.

When I was 10, I had a group of friends that I used to love to make movies with, and we made them growing up; we did it all through high school.

I think my writing has an old-fashioned feel to it for whatever reason. I'm just so influenced by the music that I listened to growing up, a lot of it out of the '60s, so it has a natural tendency to feel like it's from another era.