I bought a dodgy gold ring off a guy in Southampton. He told me to check it was real gold by heating it up with a lighter and pressing it against my skin, because real gold doesn't burn. I still have the scar on my left hand.

Be yourself. If you're not yourself, who are you? But take advice; listen to people. If you're not listening, you're lost. You're a sheep among wolves.

I've given up trying to understand what people think about me. It seems like a lot of people don't like the music we make and don't know me, or something.

I've been part of running a label since I was a kid, so I understand how it works. But the more and more I learn about it, the less and less interested I am in it.

The best feeling I ever get is when I finish a song, and it exists, and it didn't exist before, and now it's there, and it makes me feel a certain way.

I don't feel real confident expressing myself except when I'm writing. I feel kind of scatterbrained. I can see everything from both sides and that makes it hard to reach conclusions. Writing enables me to clarify things.

My favorite rhymes are sort of half-rhymes where you might just get the vowel sound the same, but it's not really a true rhyme. That gives you far more flexibility to capture the feeling you're trying to express. But sometimes it's best not to have any rhyme.

I like ideas, but I don't like being preached to.

I've thought about the idea of, 'Can happiness and creativity co-exist?' So much of what I've done, I think, has been based on being dissatisfied or incomplete or lonely. The answer is, 'There isn't an answer, necessarily.'

It's dangerous to buy into praise and criticism for what you do when you're trying to present your music to people. I don't ignore it completely, but I don't dwell on it too much.

Music is unique because you can get behind enemy lines a little bit, get into people's houses and into their heads, on their stereos, and win hearts and minds.

With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.

To finish a song is the best feeling in the world.

When I would first come to New York on tour, I hated the place.

The only thing major labels can really offer is money.

On good days, I can see the inherent goodness in people, and that human beings have a high capacity to learn and adapt. But things like the environment, nuclear weapons and ideas like peak oil - if you think about them too much, they can really freak you out.

If there's a song that stops meaning anything to me, then I'll quit playing it.

It seems like everything I do musically I tend to lose a few fans and gain a few fans, and it all kind of evens out.

When you're 16 or 17, I think like most people that age, the first time you experience certain things in life, whether it's heartbreak or death or love, obviously it's going to seem like a much bigger deal.

It's very strange when people get so focused on what a song means, what actual events inspired a song. That gets people really excited for some reason... But that's what's great about music - however people interpret it, whatever they see, is what I want to be there for them.

People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.

You can only really understand good if you have bad, so the idea of heaven or anything that happens for eternity, even if it's nice, I can't imagine it being nice forever. Even the idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it's kind of a nice thing to say, you know.

I was raised Catholic, and I have an aversion to anyone who takes religion to the extreme.

You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it.