Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It's a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.

Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.

We do all, myself included, we tend to hold ourselves to pretty low standards. But when it comes to judging public figures or politicians or people we've never met, we tend to hold people to very high standards, and, if we held ourselves to those standards, we'd always fall short.

Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.