It's always an enormous pressure when you do a sequel. The demands are so high, and it's expensive.

Sometimes, disaster can inspire ingenuity.

Ultimately, a director is a storyteller. I wanted to fortify that part of my life as a director, so I thought the best way to do that is to study and learn about the greatest stories ever written.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

I know how to create and make people feel something. Honestly, if I didn't do this, I would just have some minimum-wage job in New Mexico, and I would go out on the weekends and make just enough money...

I kept notebooks as a kid, and they were important to me.

Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'

I love the idea of playing a character, to get that chance to be somebody completely different.

I always say that I don't believe I'm a chef. I try to be a storyteller.

I never judge my song titles; I just spit them out.

Watching the dailies and then watching the... episodes, it really hits you: 'Damn, I did that?' I must have been crazy to get into those situations.

In the studio, if things go wrong, you stop things and fix them. I have never been in a recording studio, really, where the people in the booth were not interested in making a very good album. It's...

A creative person, a very creative person, is always alone, impatient and frustrated.

I have this bookmark with glued-on macaroni. I made it in the fourth grade while in detention for giving a girl a tattoo using two rocks rubbed together and a stick.

I still audition a lot and work really hard to get work. So I don't really walk around feeling like I've made it. My short term goals are really just to be creatively stimulated and to be excited...

Makeup is malleable and mercurial: The biggest joy I have every day is the opportunity to create, to play, and to invent with something I've loved forever.

There is actually no such thing as an Artist type. 'Artist' is just an economic designation, a box you tick on a form. We are all people, and we are all creative.

I can only do music if I can do it the way I can do it.

My writing process is chaos. I usually start with an overarching theme. Then I establish several story threads, but I don't outline. I just start writing and keep notes for what may come. It's an...

'Xen,' to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. 'Mutant' is a response to it and is more extroverted.

When I'm making the music, I feel like everything I throw out has to work. It counts. Because if you don't have people turning they neck all the way around to see what it is, it ain't stick on the...

I don't want to have a label. I just want to do everything. My music, my voice, my talent, my vision, it transcends all of those boxes. That's why I try my best to try any language, I try to think in...

Everything that I sing about, especially songs like 'Far From Home' and 'The Bleeding,' I really put 110 percent of myself into it, so it's difficult.

I never understood bands who were only influenced by a narrow era of, say, five years of music.

When I go into the studio I just want to make something that feels good.

My thing about demos is that you usually prefer them to the finished thing.

I don't remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.

To me, if people really want to improvise, get into classes and learn.

My sister, myself, and my cousins would put on shows for our parents and charge them to come and watch, apparently. That's what I'm told. My parents said I knew how to milk it.

From the time I was three or four years old, I drew all the time. Drew all the time, every second.