I rode on a float in one of the parades in Mississippi. It's an experience.

It's a lot easier to tell the truth usually.

I like home recordings and studio recordings just as much as each other - I don't think one is better - but for this record I wanted to see what I could do in a real studio with real producers.

I didn't know how many people knew who Ferdinand was.

I didn't think I was gonna be playing on the Oscars or anything.

I don't think that Dreamworks would have signed me expecting to really mess around with whatever it is I do.

I actually don't think that I'm gonna sell a lot of records.

I wondered if I would talk about drug use. But I guess, why hide it?

But I was also doing odd jobs around Portland, like spreading gravel and transplanting bamboo trees.

Well, I try not to think about the general public since I have no idea what the general public is and I don't think anybody does.

I rode on a float in one of the parades in Mississippi. It's an experience.

It was kind of ridiculous to carry it up to a certain point and then drop the ball or the bomb, like quitting the band right after we had signed to Virgin.

I was coming off of a lot of psyche meds and other things.

It's just that a lot of songs that are popular right now, they don't have any meaning.

My girlfriend at the time convinced me to send these songs to Cavity Search. When they wanted to put out my record I was totally shocked.

If you play acoustic guitar you're the depressed, sensitive guy.

I don't really like New York better than Portland. It's just a different place.

It touches on drug use. I got caught up in that for almost two years.

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record.

I just wanted to move out of Portland to do something.

I didn't have a hard time making it, I had a hard time letting it go.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head that seems more important than something designed to raise money to keep something going that keeps IV drug users from dying.

There are lots of things I like about playing in a band, the things I can't do by myself you know.

I'm just writing songs about how I feel or about how people I know feel.

There's always that argument to make - that you're in better company historically if people don't understand what you're doing.

The band's filter, but playing live is a lot of fun.

I mean people just have a way of - y'know they'll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don't want to be in.

Because God only knows why people like what they like and don't like something else.

And I'm not trying to write heavy songs.

I watched myself put my paw in the bear trap on that one because there was this clause about leaving members.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.