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 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.

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

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.

It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.

A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

Music should be universal. My life perspective, my lifestyle - I'm not going to impose that on the people that listen to my music. That's kind of a perverse form of snobbery I like to reject.

The terrible thing about sunlight is it shows the dirt.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

Quite frankly, there is no answer to climate change without substantially, dramatically, increasing the amount of renewable energy in the global energy system.

All high beauty has a moral element in it.

Two women placed together makes cold weather.

I love to act and that's sort of my first love. That's what I started out doing.