Annie E. Clark quotes:

I think cults are probably a little less scary. To me, it's scarier that 25 people would wear robes and jump up and down and try to convert everyone to happiness than a Kool-Aid suicide.

Checking voicemail is like, "When's the other shoe going to drop?" I'm always afraid it's going to be terrible news I don't want to hear.

The most important thing is setting up these directives for yourself. Like, "I'm only going to use these three colors - go!" That's why Einstein wore the same thing every day; you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every morning.

I have a lot of guitar heroes I guess, some of them are female and some of them are male. Robert Fripp is one of them, and Marc Ribot, that's another guitar hero.

Putting your ego aside and confronting your weaknesses and just letting things happen is hard. Not to use a Scientology term, but it's difficult to do an emotional or an artistic audit.

It's pretty amazing, someone having that kind of charisma - and it still happens in micro and macro forms - to convince a whole gaggle of people to kill themselves. Or put on robes and jump up and down. That takes a very charismatic leader.

Everybody's got a dark side, but mine doesn't include being around people who are mean.

I like to deal with my dark side in a creative way, and just sing about killing people instead of actually doing it.

I was like the roadie, I was carrying gear, checking things in at airports, making sure they had flowers backstage and interfacing with promoters who were sometimes really nice and sometimes a little seedy. It was a great apprenticeship, to be in the music industry.

I'm first and foremost a guitar player. I've been playing since I was 12, which is over half of my life.

What I did with my first records was, my writing process was that I didn't touch any instruments to write it, so I was making it all on the computer, and really the arrangements were coming first, the intricate thing.

For a brief moment, I considered deconstructing the song and going down a cerebral road, but then I realized it would kill what is most powerful about it.

I know that, physically, I'm a very demure-looking person. But I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow. I'm lucky that I get to play music, and that it's not going to come out in some totally destructive way.

I got offstage and was just looking at my hands, and they were shaking. I was like, 'I wanna kill someone! What's happening?'

There's always something extremely personal in the songs, but I may change the point of view from what I actually experienced.

I'd listen to things that felt really good in the moment and realize they were clouded by enthusiasm or caffeine. And things that I was struggling to get out ended up being really compelling. It's an emotional roller coaster; there's exhilaration and there's shame.

With the first kid, you micromanage it, making sure there's no hair out of place when it goes off to school. But by the third kid, it's more like, "Oh, you want to wear a splatter-painted, Hard Rock Café T-shirt for seven days in a row and not brush your hair? Go for it. Be who you want to be."

I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.

I think anything that you can't poke fun at is a little too precious.

I wanted to give the songs a run for their money, to see if they stood on their own without a lot of accoutrements. It made more sense - and it was easier, too - to go out alone and see if these songs could get in a couple of fistfights and still be standing.

I'm a bit of a vagabond - a person who loses time and space because you don't know where you are.

I was a lusty kid who loved Tennessee Williams. Sexy plays. [For musicians] there are so many that it's hard just to say one. Certain things, like the first time you hear A Love Supreme, you're floored. It takes whatever you were listening to and blows a hole in it.

Music is kind of a strange business, and it's too weird of a job to have mean, conniving people around.

I have a phobia of checking voicemail. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and everything is, like, you're gonna get kidnapped, or somebody's gonna die, or killer bees are going to take you out. I'm a very anxious person.

I do love the ceremony of putting on a record but I don't have space for a vinyl collection.

The schematics are a little bit tricky, but once you get it down you're able to really program an entire show. Every song has a lot of different guitar sounds in it, so that's what it is.

Every part of every song can have a totally different musical sound, because otherwise if I wanted to go from a verse of one song to the chorus of another, I'd have to go: "Uh, okay, press that pedal and then... press that pedal, and then press that pedal off."

I think every time I play, every show is different, and I think that at a certain point a song isn't about you anymore. It's about the audience, it's about how the song has worked its way into other people's lives and that kind of keeps the meaning of the song new, because you see it reflected in other people every night.

I don't even wanna say female guitar-players, just guitar-players, because music of all things doesn't need to be gendered and stratified, that's so boring.

I have the weirdest job. It's not every day that you get to stand up onstage and unload every ounce of your misanthropic bile onto a crowd of people, and they're like, "Cool! Hit us again!"

I just think that the question of women in rock or women playing guitar, I just think it's such a non-issue, and I think that probably the sooner critics and press outlets can just erase the 'what's it like being a women in rock?' question from their vocabulary, the better off everyone will be.

An mp3 is a compressed form of data. It's not the full spectrum. It's never going to sound as good as a record.

I think one thing people forget is that every technological advance we fetishize had its place in time.

CDs are usually an hour long because that's the amount a CD could hold - not because that's the optimal amount of time for any given musical expression.

All these things that we are very nostalgic for come from a place of technology dictating [art]. This time and place is no different.