Very seldom do I write words and have somebody put the music to them. If I'm writing lyric and music at the same time, I usually finish the music rather quickly.

I know that song writing is probably the most mystical of the things that I do, in a sense that I'm not sure where it came from or how it started. It's something that I just knew how to do. It's something that just happens.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

If we are exhorted to play simple melodies with beauty rather than difficult ones with error, the same should be applied to writing; simple words greater effect.

The music lets me see the story but the story doesn't let me write the words.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.