Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records.

I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting.

It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.

I never really followed grunge.

By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.

By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.

I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.

I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy provided those ways do not assume to interfere with ours.

Human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions.

Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations.

Sometimes you have to go through some ugly stuff to get to the good stuff.

Nature does not make leaps.

For love is mor than gold or gret richesse; Gold faileth ofte; love wol abyde.

We have to choose between a global market driven only by calculations of short-term profit, and one which has a human face.

I'm often daydreaming and it's because I've always liked the idea of there being something more than the normal world.

Just because I'd spent so many years coloring inside the lines, it wasn't fair for me to expect perfection. People make mistakes. Life isn't fair. People change.