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We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I think that most people who write about music just want to fill some paper. They're not really interested in getting to the heart of something. Otherwise, they wouldn't write what they write.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

People write music, and the music is out there for people to interpret it how they want to.

I'm not musically inclined. It blows my mind that people can write music. I don't have that talent; I look up to the people that do.

The thing about good writing is it has a music to it.

I do look at songwriting as a lot of work. I don't over-intellectualize music as a special medium that only some people deserve to do. I think it's something you do if you put the work in.

People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'