It's hard to go out in front of people with an acoustic guitar and improvise for 30 or 40 minutes, but I had a compulsion to do it. I just had to in a way that I can't really explain.

I definitely have a different perspective on music in general. But once I actually have a guitar in my hands, I think I disappear into the same black hole that I was disappearing into when I was 15.

I was working at eBay, so I would just troll the vintage categories, find old amps and what have you. I was buying a fair amount of stuff and playing with it and then selling it back.

I don't think I had a specific moment when I thought, "I'm not going to play music anymore." I just played less and got involved in other things.

With Fred McDowell, I just love the way he articulates the notes. I'm hardly unique in that, but there's just something about that that I love.

I did pull out my old Telecaster, and have been thinking I'd like to play that loud with a drummer. But I haven't actually done that yet.

The nice thing about solo is I don't have to coordinate with anyone else's schedule, since it's hard for me just to have a free 15 minutes here and there.

I had opportunities to play with other people and give my self some sort of security, but for some reason I wanted to play solo and just put it out there.

I had a guitar sitting around, and it just happened to have four strings on it, and I would sit around watching TV and playing it. I ended up writing bunches of songs around four strings.

A horn has that voice quality, and an electric guitar can emulate that. But playing an acoustic, the notes don't sustain like that.

As a monk you have a responsibility to meditate many hours a day. Not just to sit there but to think of the ten thousand radiances.

Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.

Collecting is the sort of thing that creeps up on you.

I spent the first years working in Jordan trying to learn as much as I could about what was taking place in the country, about where there were gaps in the development process that needed attention.

How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?

The work itself is what motivates me. I like my own stuff, you know? I like the way it looks. I do it to please myself first.

I’m not into the whole Austrian type, strongly libertarian economics. I like more mainstream economics.

Fling me across the fabric of time and the seas of space. Make me nothing and from nothing-everything.

One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

That you were once unkind befriends me now, And for that sorrow, which I then did feel, Needs must I under my transgression bow, Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel.