Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.

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.

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.

From a personal point of view, I'd like to interview my great-grandparents because I barely knew them, and I know next to nothing about my family beyond 100 years.

Men who have a thirty-six-tele vised-football- games-a- week-habit should be declared legally dead and their estates probated.

A book is a machine to think with.

Accept people, don't stereotype people. Don't think because right now they're driving a cab, they're not going to have a master's degree or that they're dumber than you.

Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people - about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.

I'm no good at anecdotes.

Neapolitans have always had their fast food. It's called pizza.

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

When you confer a benefit on those worthy of it, you confer a favor on all.

Whatever you have spend less.