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

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.

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

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

I think anyone who makes products has this simultaneous joy and, almost, shame looking at it. You look at it all day and all you can see is all these things you want to make better.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.

Waiting for the Lord in a season of darkness should not be a time of inactivity. We should do what we can do. And doing is often God's appointed remedy for despair.

Don't throw up your hands or abandon your values when you run into political difficulties. Stop, get a sense of the political terrain, and experiment with some ways to move cautiously forward.

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

It seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs him his job.

In requiring this candor and simplicity of mind in those who would investigate the truth of our religion, Christianity demands nothing more than is readily conceded to every branch of human science.

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.

I've been a writer longer than I've been an actor. I wrote short stories like crazy when I was in high school and college. I worked in advertising before I moved to L.A. to pursue acting.