Chris Thile

“I guess I am working pretty much all the time.”

“You need to put yourself in the way of the music that stood the test of time. You're doing yourself an incredible disservice not be interested in the width and breadth of it.”

“There's a lot of steps between there not being music and there being music. Composition is one part of that, but if no one performs it... It's like if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“Great music is the only genre that actually matters, and the members of that club are far more similar to each other than they are to any genre they might be commonly associated with.”

“My folks were and are devoted public radio fans, who started listening to 'A Prairie Home Companion' in the 1980s; Garrison and Co. were the permanent headliners of their weekends.”

“I'm just done downplaying how much I love Radiohead and how massive of an influence they are on what I do, because it's pretty obvious.”

“I'll often order a cortado and stand there quizzing the poor barista about the extraction time, how much pressure they are applying and how many grams are in it. I am that guy. It's reprehensible to the max, but it's how I go through my life.”

“I'd say playing with a group or playing solo are equally rewarding, but in a different way.”

“The greatest creators are as hungry to consume as they are to create.”

“My life conforms to music, not the other way around.”

“You go to the Grammys and you say, 'I don't care if I win or not,' and of course you care.”

“When they invented the mandolin, it was as if they were trying to come up with the least efficient means of extracting noise from a piece of wood.”

“I just love getting as many experiences making music for and with people as possible.”

“I'm really not handy. I'm not good at things like changing a light bulb. If something is broken, the chances of me being able to fix it are slim to none.”

“Ever since I became better acquainted with classical music, I've wanted to try my hand at longer forms, but I could never really see my way to it. And after I got divorced, all of a sudden I had a lot of pent-up energy and lots of stuff that had gone into trying to make this failing relationship work that kind of got reapplied.”

“I'm always excited about music, but having spent so much time in its pursuit - well, my musical life is complicated.”

“I consider it a great honor to be part of the dissemination of hearable art.”

“You know, I look at Twitter as kind of a roomful of people who are interested in what you have to say. The people who follow you are, presumably, somewhat interested with what you have to say.”

“The fact that I'm a fifth of Punch Brothers... that's lucky for me because I feel like I get to operate in the context of one of the great string bands. There's just not another string band I would rather be in, and i'm just compelled to make music for and with string bands. It's what I know, and it's kind of like who I am.”

“Different people need different things.”