Smith: "It's a lot easier to tell the truth usually."

Smith: "I mean people just have a way of - y'know they'll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don't want to be in."

Smith: "I didn't have a hard time making it, I had a hard time letting it go."

Smith: "I think the suggestion that all my songs are personal is insulting because that assumes that I have a bunch of issues that I feel the need to unload on strangers. That is not the case. It also assumes that I just talk about myself the whole time which, again, is not true."

Smith: "I truly hope the future will bring me something to feel nostalgic about, because there's really nothing much so far I can remember fondly."

Smith: "I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection. But I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful. But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in this endless twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can."

Smith: "There's always that argument to make - that you're in better company historically if people don't understand what you're doing."

Smith: "I can't think of anything off the top of my head that seems more important than something designed to raise money to keep something going that keeps IV drug users from dying."

Smith: "It's just that a lot of songs that are popular right now, they don't have any meaning."

Smith: "Music is worth doing just because. It doesn’t have to be justified by some political point of view, and it’s kind of insulting to the music to make it a tool for something else."

Smith: "Well, I try not to think about the general public since I have no idea what the general public is and I don't think anybody does."

Smith: "Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else."

Smith: "I'm the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous."

Smith: "I like home recordings and studio recordings just as much as each other - I don't think one is better - but for this record I wanted to see what I could do in a real studio with real producers."

Smith: "I wondered if I would talk about drug use. But I guess, why hide it?"

Smith: "I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television."

Smith: "It's hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It's much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation."

Smith: "I'm happy some of the time, and some of the time I'm not. But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever, it's usually happy and sad at the same time."

Smith: "I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record."