I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous, self-righteous period it didn't exactly win us any friends.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition.

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn't even stand up, let alone kick the ball.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words.

If you mean do I use the guitar when I'm sitting at home writing stuff, then basically no, never. All I would ever write would be stuff that my fingers easily fall into.

Hard work is the bridge between success and your dreams.

Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them - but not for love.

My commitment to gender equality is rooted in the quintessentially American principle of equal justice under law.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

If they wish to fight today, let them come like men.

The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.

We must remember that everything depends on how we use a material, not on the material itself... New materials are not necessarily superior. Each material is only what we make it.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.