Stevens: "Pop music is so structured, and I'm excited to try and challenge that in my own work."

Stevens: "Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world."

Stevens: "I’m very democratic in how I live and move through the world, understanding that there are many possibilities and explanations for why we’re here."

Stevens: "I'm pretty involved in everything I do, which isn't always efficient and doesn't necessarily make for the more successful product. But I do feel that, in that sense, everything I do has a comprehensiveness to it." 

Stevens: "Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating." 

Stevens: "I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects." 

Stevens: "You’ve got to stay nimble as an artist. I think it’s important to be open to all possibilities and all options creatively, whether it’s high profile or niche. I take it all very seriously."

Stevens: "[Social Media] monetises us, it commodifies human instinct. There’s a loss of identity within that transaction."

Stevens: "Systemic racism is nothing new. Corporate greed is nothing new. Political corruption is old as the hills. It’s just now that we’ve built a system in which all of these social diseases are visible and exposed. In some cases, they’re being celebrated and it’s pretty ugly."

Stevens: "The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life."

Stevens: "We are all immigrants and refugees in a wildly changing world, dominated by superfluous boundaries built by blood and war."

Stevens: "I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise." 

Stevens: "I think musicians should stay off television generally."

Stevens: "In experiencing so much and growing older, I’ve realised there was definitely a naivety to my former self. There was a hopefulness, joyfulness and playfulness to a lot of those early records that’s been slowly receding over the years. It’s hard for me to speak for it because it’s happened so gradually, like watching a tree grow. But you start to lose faith in the structures of society as you get older, and I think that’s coming to the surface now."

Stevens: "I think deep down I’m more of a naturalist. My soul belongs in the wilderness."

Stevens: "The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last."

Stevens: "I'd like to do a record that doesn't even reference actual places. Because I think it's kind of an open-ended concept. It doesn't have to be taken so literally."

Stevens: "Audacity is central to everything I do. A lot of times I think my work is about just seeing if I can get away with it."

Stevens: "It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog." 

Stevens: "A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime."

Stevens: "I wouldn't mind being popular in other ways, but not with music." 

Stevens: "The spiritual ambiguity growing up made me really latch onto a faith - Protestantism - that was somewhat conventional. Everyone else was rebelling against traditions and institutions, whereas I was rebelling against the upheaval and uncertainty in my family."

Stevens: "I find in music there's a space and a language I can use to express things in ways I can't describe conversationally."

Stevens: "I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all."

Stevens: "I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it."

Stevens: "I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption." 

Stevens: "I am not naturally inclined to history or geography - maybe that's why I like to sing about it, because it helps me remember."

Stevens: "I love anything by Tchaikovsky. He was the real pop star of his day."

Stevens: "Morals, principles and laws are when faith is reduced to standards and those standards basically just bind us, and we become prejudicial, racist, self-serving when we're guided by these laws... When a developed country uses Christianity in its policies, in government, in maintaining corporate wealth, that's a bastardized rendering of a faith." 

Stevens: "In third grade, I had to an oral report on the state of Oregon. I brought up Big Foot sightings, and I remember there was an argument about whether or not Big Foot was valid history. Ever since then I've been thinking about how subjective history is."

Stevens: "My anxiety level of my own work and what I'm doing and focusing on my art and all of that stuff? That's fundamental." 

Stevens: "I'm a very self-conscious person; I think we all are, but I'm especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances; it's just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise."

Stevens: "It's hard to reconcile my personal beliefs with an entire institution like the Church or the Republicans. Or with people within those political persuasions who have such different ideologies but confess the same things I confess spiritually."