My uncle gave me a trumpet, but I loved the Louis Armstrong sound and the Harry James sound and I played by ear and I played always soulful or very direct from the gut.

You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.

I grew a love for helpless, defenseless things. People would give me lions and jaguars. I had cheetahs, monkeys.

I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs.

Buddy Rich was one of the most incredible technicians in the world, on this planet, but the only people he could really impress, who knew what he was doing was another musician or another drummer.

There's a saying. If you want someone to love you forever, buy a dog, feed it and keep it around.

I used to be a mean maniac. Someone once threw a firecracker at a show and I jumped off the side of the stage and whacked 'em on the side of the head.

The kids called me King of the Surf Guitar. I surfed sunup to sundown.

My philosophy is the thicker the wood the thicker the sound, the bigger the string the bigger the sound. My smallest string is a 14 gauge.

I don't play pyrotechnic scales. I play about frustration, patience, anger. Music is an extension of my soul.

Every song is like a painting.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.

In the past, there have been a range of treaties that divided Congress and every administration was able to get them through.

If that's the last image of Michael Jordan...how magnificent is it!?

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

A relative of mine ... spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising and irritating to teh Almighty, I should think.

Some people are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month and it would not get through their skins.

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.