..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else

I wanted something very dense, something that would sustain long and more pieces of wood that would be soft, sweet, for more of a mellow sound.

One minute we're over here, the next minute we're doing something completely different. But it's interesting because you are producing so many things you couldn't do with analog.

Every setback might be the very thing that makes you carry on and fight all the harder and become much better.

You can't go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren't any.

.. the guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It's everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It's everything, but it's elusive

When you just get mixed up & there's too much going on, then it's time to pick up your guitar.

I used my mother's radio as a PA system. I'd take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

The audience, they're not professionals. They just love music. It isn't necessary to play over their heads to be admired.

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

It seems supernatural, but only because it is not understood.

Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don't look so different anymore to some.

Health care has become a proxy for a broader set of issues about how much government should be involved in our economy, particularly coming off a huge economic crisis.

I don't have anything to prove.

The gym can serve as an excellent place where kids and young men and women can really empty their issues right on the floor.

Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline in a car without wheels. It isn't going to lead anybody anywhere.

It's tempting to remember that the Tea Party had a peak and then the Republican Party establishment sort of beat it back down. And so these things are won in a day.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.