I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That's what I told everybody I was going to be when I grew up.

We'd like to think that our music will always be bigger than any one of our individual personalities.

I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That's what I told everybody I was going to be when I grew up.

We're shooting for the title of hardest-working band in America.

My favorite jellybean is the pink one with the flavor inside.

All of our songs take these really big creative turns and twists throughout the process, so sometimes songs will start out as a melody or some musical chord progressions.

As an artist, I want a reaction.

Asking someone to describe what something sounds like is like telling a blind person to guess what I look like.

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.

I don't drink. I choose to be sober now. I have drunk over the last six years, but I just don't want to be that person anymore.

I don't go out and pick fights.

I don't like to hold back, because that's how you hurt yourself.

I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain so to speak and kind of being able to vent it through my music.

If fans come up to me, I talk to them.

It's cool to be a part of recovery. This is just who I am, this is what I write about, what I do, and most of my work has been a reflection of what I've been going through in one way or another.

It's not cool to be an alcoholic.

Once we start hitting lyrical themes that can whack you from all these different perspectives, we know we're onto something special.

The fans are the biggest reason we do what we do.

There are always going to be encounters that you kind of wish went differently. But the average fan really isn't fanatical.

This is a business of love and labor.

To pigeonhole a genre as being successful or unsuccessful is weird.

Touring for two years is excruciating.

We like playing smaller venues, but we know how many people want to come and see us so we don't ever want to stop anyone who wants to come to a show from coming.

We're not a political band, we're a socially-minded band.

Well, we promised our fans that we'd put out records faster, and that's what we're doing. We figured out a way to condense our cycle, so to speak, by... continuing to write, trying to keep the creative ball rolling as often as possible.

When I'm writing, I'm constantly thinking about myself, because it's the only experience I have to draw on. And I don't see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience, but I know that my songs have validity to them, and that's why the fans are there.

You're constantly trying to prove yourself, even after you've made it.

Tattoos exude pain and pleasure all at the same time.

A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

I had a kind of Dickensian childhood.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

I didn't have a happy childhood.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

My whole family actually, but my parents. I had such a normal and amazing childhood. I've been so lucky. My parents are cool and normal. They don't talk about the business and I still have stuff to do at their house.

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.