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" I meet people in my daily life, people who seem to experience some change and some growth on a personal level, and that gives me hope. "

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" People's real hopes and dreams can be distorted and misdirected and packaged until you're not sure what you really want or what you even really need. "

" I found myself in the middle of a race riot when I was about 14 years old, and I found someone pointing a gun at me and telling me to run or they'd shoot me. "

" I don't try to project any image at all, other than the person that I am. "

" When you feel like you've had a good show, you go backstage and you talk to yourself about it, and if you have a bad show you talk to yourself about it. "

" As you might imagine, I'm approached by lots of organizations and lots of people who want me to support their various charitable efforts in some way. And I look at those requests, and I basically try to do what I can. "

" Some things remain fragments, just the lyrics and melodies or a line or two or a verse. "

" Men are able to sustain a career into their 50s and 60s and still present themselves as sex symbols. With women, on the other hand, people say, 'Why doesn't she retire?' "

" I end up writing about all kinds of things. I never make an attempt to write about anything in particular. I don't have a little list of topics to write about. "

" Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms. "

" You need to keep something for yourself. As a writer, I feel that even more strongly. I feel like I need to be able to freely observe the world. That's the way I like to move through the world; I don't need to be the focus of attention. If I am, it impairs my ability to write and to do what I do. "

" My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it. "

" As a child I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me - also because I read a lot. "

" Honestly, I think, as an artist, it's everything that's in your life that informs what you do. So, obviously, growing up in Cleveland has played a big role in how I see the world. "

" It's fun playing small venues. "

" There have been some gains made in terms of more equality for women in the workplace and in the way the legal system deals with issues of violence against women. "

" I never assumed I would have that commercial success, so it was a total surprise. And honestly, I never assumed that it would ever happen again. "

" I see some recurring themes: things that feel threaded together, some symbolic references, and songs about some of the big questions, like death. There are a lot of references to weather, too! "

" A lot of kids spent more time out of school than in, but I always loved school and thought it was my way out of Cleveland, and out of poverty. "

" When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve. "

" So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics. "

" Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control. "

" Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it. "

" What does the future look like if the heads of society ask our young people to risk their lives for questionable causes? I think it looks rather bleak. "

" Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals. "

" It all comes together. It's - that's the way it's always worked for me with songwriting. "

" I learn all these things about the record talking about it after it's finished. "

" I often write either really early in the morning, or really late at night. "

" I can't think of anything worse, really, than to try to live up to someone else's expectations of what you should be. You don't make art by consensus. "

" I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write. "

" I'm not sure about anything as far as religion and spirituality go. "