I think when a musician loses their inhibition and dives deep into their soul, that's a prayer. It's so powerful that you will touch people whether it's good or bad.

I won't give up swimming, even if it kills me. I love the rhythm of it.

I made one rule for myself, and I really try to live it: Play music you love, with people you love, for people you love. If I can't be that kind of musician, I'll drive a cab.

For me, learning music and playing music and learning your instrument has incredible parallels for our day-to-day existence as human beings. All the ideas of discipline, and having a sense of yourself and translating that to music, that's all part of life's journey.

When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.

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.

My garage/office is strewn with Post-its, cards, folders, notebooks, yoga mats and multicoloured pens, all purchased in a quest to unlock a magic way of working that will ensure my ascension to next-level creativity.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.