I really wanted to get to the animal core of rock music and eliminate anything that wasn't necessary.

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.

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

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Creativity is a talent we inherit from God.

Silence, like salt, only seems to be weightless. In reality, if one allows time to dampen it, it grows heavy as an anvil.

Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent.

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

Africa is not poor, Africa is being looted

I held out my dad’s magic box and let it o, sure it would smash to the floor. Instead, the box disappeared. “Cool,” I said. “Sure you I can get it back?” “No,” Bast said. “Now come on!

Everybody has fear. The difference is that the coward does not control fear and the brave... gets over it.

Even if my father wasn't speaking to me, he would never, ever miss a baseball game.