From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home.

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.

Tha know where thy are we' ferrets. Ya never know where ya are we' lasses

What she coaxed out of me was a visceral need to live, and wasn't that what fueled immortality and made it worthwhile anyway? That there were wonders still left to be uncovered?

Never do the eyes of the devil shine as much as when he hears the words: liberty, equality, fraternity.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

Putin knows how to run the KGB playbook. I mean, he knows how to work people.

Performing was terrifying.

There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right.

One has to watch out for engineers. They begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb.

Where the lips are silent the heart has a thousand tongues.

John Boehner chose a huge gavel. I think somebody's compensating for his small government.