My music education was oral. I was resistant to scores and things like that. In Jewish religious music, there are no scores. You learn everything by rote, by ear, by repeating.

I never became primarily a musician! I've always been a wanderer and I'm always bored.

Not that I have anything against music now, but I just hated being an anything. I don't know why.

People never heard bells in Western music sounding really cataclysmic. You hear that more in Russian music or in Asian, Indonesian traditions.

I'm not afraid to be a Russian Jewish romantic in my approach to anything, even in my animal divinities, or anything about the feeling.

I actually started as a singer in Brooklyn, and I lived in a community. To get out of the ghetto of my community, I was a musician.

I never wanted to have a profession, and I've succeeded in not having one, or if I did have one it never paid, or it's never been especially long-term.

There are some people who love being a something, but I also got the gist in the 60's when I grew up that you could be, in the art scene, very diverse.

I never made any money from my music. I don't make that much; I make it flip-flopping between five and ten different disciplines.

I hung around hippie-ish kind of people and, first of all, they never made any money. If you never make any money, you never have to declare any profession!

There are pieces that in the history of music that also make me cry. I'm not ashamed to cry.

A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.

The body is at its best between the ages of thirty and thirty-five.

They looked great, you know the drawings of the guys playing looked great and bits of string around their necks. So it didn't seem to be that difficult a thing to do, or that inaccessible.

Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.

I simply like guns because you can't shoot people without them.

Action and adaptability create opportunity.

Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.

If we lose today, it will be over my dead body. They'll have to leave me face down on the mound.

I'm a minimalist at heart. If a song doesn't need a solo, I'm not going to force one into it.