My non-career. My excuse for a career? Honestly, I never think about the word 'career.' I've had managers, the minute they say it to me, they look at me and just roll their eyes.

The first time I met Patti Smith was in a laundromat. We knew some of the same people, including Richard Hell.

I just don't like people coming up to me and saying something. It immediately makes you become insincere. There is no way you can react to it sincerely.

When I think of 'influence', I think of 'influenza', like somebody's picked up a germ.

The song Venus de Milo, the whole subject of it is Love is a drug.

I never liked mellow sounding guitar.

You can't get so interested in just making sounds. The point of it all is some kind of expression.

Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.

I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live.

Everybody's out trying to be commercial. I'm not trying to be anything, really.

When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.

My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.

I grew up in the limelight and being the child of someone famous. So my relationship with fame is not bedazzled.

Conservatives have long argued, correctly, that 'fine-tuning' the economy is a chimera, but that argument seems to have disappeared from the conservative handbook.

He was golden and beautiful as a sunset.

How come it takes so little time for a child who is afraid of the dark to become a teenager who wants to stay out all night?

I sat me down to watch upon a bank With ivy canopied and interwove With flaunting honeysuckle.

I don't think I'm known for my gifts - I'm known for my gall. I don't want to be just a famous person - I'm too old.

Is it not astonishing that the love of repose keeps us in continual agitation?

There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.

Rather than continuing to base our economy on a finite supply of dead things, we can base it on sources that are practically infinite and eternal: the sun, the moon, and the Earth's inner fire.