Style to me is incidental. The British are very adept at creating it for its own sake, but the best style is incidental. John Coltrane had a style but it was totally incidental to what he was.

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.

What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm capitalism is that kind of a system.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

The richest treasure God has for you are the people in your life. Give thanks and don't take them for granted.

Anyone who can see as far as tomorrow in politics arouses the wrath of people who can see no farther than today.

I find it difficult [to believe] that... Christians accuse [Black Muslims] of teaching racial supremacy or... hatred, because their own history and... teachings are filled with it.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

They call it golf because all the other four-letter words were taken.

Things are only hopeless when you lose all hope.

There’s no accounting for the mysteries of the human heart

There must be consistency in direction.