I don't have room in my mind to think about musical equipment.

I hear luxury brand names, I cringe.

In the beginning, because of the Pavement thing, we were able to sell a certain amount of records. We were able to sell not such a great amount of records, but enough to live on. So there was no incentive to do what didn't come naturally.

Some people like my singing. But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people.

I read Henry Miller's 'Nexus,' 'Sexus' and 'Plexus' the summer after I graduated from college. It cemented my decision to spurn any and all careers.

Sometimes I turn the TV just below where you can hear it and write down what I think they might be saying by the mumbles and rhythms.

I made records for 20 years, I lived off it. But people would say I made so many mistakes, I did so many things you're not supposed to do. I had a band name nobody could say. I didn't play live. I never practiced, I never got better at my instrument.

I try every day and every night to find a movie or a TV show that I can watch, but I just can't make it past ten minutes of anything.

In my whole life, I've had maybe 10 people who have told me how much my music means to them.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

I always had a background belief in God. In other words, instinctually I've never doubted that we are not alone.

I'm not the type to demand affirmation or to worry that I'll be forgotten. I'm more the type to dare the world to forget me.

I've never done much to try to build an audience.

All my songs were made at the end of the neck, 'farmer's corner' chords.

When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.

My father is a despicable man.

I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.

I guess on all Silver Jews records, it's extremely male-centric.

My great grandfather was the last practicing Jew in my family. He died in 1982.

I'm not convinced I have fans.

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.

Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.

When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.