I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.

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

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

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

We will have a happy marriage if it kills him.

Take a chance of your life, you're risking nothing in this planet.

I thought I'd just do a wave of movies, and then I'd burn out. They just kept coming together.

The day you stop racing, is the day you win the race.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

It is very easy for us to go, you know, "I am being cruel to be kind," when really we are just ... being cruel. Because it makes us feel big, or whatever.

Truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

I think every human being has a level of melancholy in life and in general.

Once best friends now strangers with memories.