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.

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.

Well, I think music for kids is never anything but experimental is it?

There are so many myths out there about Marianne Faithfull, I had to, um, detach. But I can turn it on because Marianne Faithfull is really an attitude, you know.

It is as great a spite to be praised in the wrong place, and by a wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature.

The Europeans who went to Africa came back with “modern' art. What is more African than a Picasso?

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.

You always hear 'black Republican,' but you never hear 'white Democrat.' We've got to get beyond the labels and stereotypes. Other people have hang-ups about it. I don't.

It's up to us to save the world for tomorrow: it's up to you and me.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

The image I had was very clear, and so in that way The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began like other books.

The most potent thing we can do is to bring more compassion online.

There is no democracy without socialism, and no socialism without democracy.