I'm pretty confident that people are going to come along for the ride. If they don't, tough.

Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.

The sexuality of children - there's a lot friction there. That tension interests me a lot.

You make your work and you can't ask for approval when you're doing it. Otherwise, it's going to be untruthful in some way.

The goal is ecstasy, but I don't want to make some sort of saccharine pop music. I want to make something that's completely uncompromising: the best possible music ever made.

The music takes you. It has to be alive. It's like you hammer something, and the way it happens to bleed leads you into new directions.

I don't want to sound like everybody else.

I like loud electric guitars because I like how you can just lose your entire being in the sound.

I'm the band leader. That's not to say that the other people are my minions - they all put in a tremendous amount of personality, and push the music in ways I would never expect.

I used to routinely break my ribs doing stupid things onstage, but I have a healthy fear of breaking my bones now.

Making those CDs, signing them, numbering them, packing them. It takes hundreds of hours, but it's worth it because I'm able to do the thing I love.

If you make your own path in this thing we call life, you will forever know that it was yours and not someone else's. - Michael A. Contés II

I thought of the old proverb: Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists.

Everybody gets so much common information all day long that they lose their common sense.

I am a big Bewitched fan... something about the way Elizabeth Montgomery twitched her nose.

For most leaders, humility comes only by wounds suffered from foolish falls.

The game is rigged to work for those who already have money and power.

My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans. The humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they're where the trouble really lies.

I really have to force myself to tidy up around the house.

If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.

My fighting gospel is T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I am never without it.