“Words are most important. I never wanted to write a song about nothing. After all, the impulse towards music is at its heart an urge to express something.”

“What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.”

“Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches. ”

“The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.”

“The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.”

“Sometimes he wrote equations, or musical notation, sometimes he wrote in Latin; he refused to tell her what it was about. "Nothing," he said. "I have nothing important or original to say, yet I feel compelled to express myself, so I just write it down and let it go.”