It's insane to have a first album, the first morning of it coming out, it's insane.

I grew up a competitive swimmer. I wanted to go the Olympics. Both my parents were professional swimmers. I competed internationally quite often, right up until I moved to California to pursue music.

I think 'Free' captured a moment in my life where I was finding myself. There's a lot of content on there about breaking free and just developing your own philosophies, and ideologies, or world views or whatever.

Intelligence is the sexiest thing in the world.

I moved to Chicago and I did theater, and then I started writing and I stop acting and I did sketch. You know, I did all of the things that, if you were serious about doing television, don't do.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen... We can drive it out with our busyness and plans.

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.