Bill Callahan

“Every day I don't Google my name, there's another beautiful day.”

“I did a lot of work without thinking about it in a calm, rational way. Stopping and thinking about what I was doing made my music calmer and deeper in tone.”

“I'm not really a child of this '120 TV channels, a billion websites' era. I tried to live that for a long time but recently realized I don't get anything from it. I told myself it was luxury, but it was really only annoying. I'd rather just watch the same 50 movies over and over.”

“I'm somewhere between a gumshoe and a journalist. A writer, not a symbol.”

“I feel like you come in under a cloak of someone else's skin for a while, but then you can shrug it off - you have to find your own voice, if you want to keep doing it. That became a really conscious thing for me.”

“My parents weren't religious at all. I remember the first time I heard about Jesus was at school.”

“I feel like there's already a written narrative going on everywhere. All the different situations and realities you're in, like words floating by. It's something that I didn't start thinking about until recently, but you can hitch that ride, that narrative that's already been created. You just have to read it and write it down.”

“They say marriages work better if you don't know the person too well. Maybe we should stop writing each other posthaste.”

“To see classic rock, you had to go to an arena. But punk was happening everywhere, even in little towns in the middle of nowhere in Maryland. I'd drive out to places I'd never been, just to go and see it.”

“I will concentrate on playing guitar, on lyrics and on singing. I am a part of things; I am not the encompassing 'Smog.'”

“I was trained to turn loneliness into laziness.”

“You get into moods - like, if somebody does something to you, then you're angry for maybe 30 seconds, or maybe 30 years. I was always interested in capturing those awful, unflattering things that everybody goes through - those hot moments, captured in ice.”

“I wanted to live in a house. I wanted to have a place where I could record at home - all of these things I'd wanted to do for years.”

“I was late to the Internet. I didn't really understand what it was. I didn't know what an email was.”

“When I write a song, it is to fill a niche in people's lives. To have a song for every experience if one hadn't been written yet.”

“There are a million tiny weird towns. You never know what you're going to get into if you drive an hour into the wild.”

“Some people write a thank you note for a gift, and it's three pages long, and some people write a thank you note, and it's five sentences - that's me. I like to pare away words because I don't want to waste anyone's time.”