The best bands kept making records and had this evolution, where by the end, by their commercial phase or sellout phase, the records are from outer space.

I have a hard time repeating myself.

I was never in the business of trying to put my name out there - I was really focused on music and records and being in the studio.

I realized I liked being in the studio and working on translating the ideas into recordings.

Im still an idealist. My manager is always trying to talk me out of it, but thats just the way I am.

If the chemistry between me and the artist is good, then that's half the battle.

I try not to become friends with musicians, but life happens and dinner happens and going out happens - it becomes interwoven in L.A.

I like to find an artist who inspires me and get into their world and challenge them.

It's been said to me that I'm self-destructive because I'll walk away from things that are good.

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

The goal is to make something that sounds new and different.

Every nation, every woman and every man must work out their own salvation.

With you, it's different. It's like a coming home.

I suppose it's amazing how quick life goes by when you have children.

For let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above the ape-regarding Christians, a well known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

Mister Dresden is a diplomatically challenged individual. He should be in a shelter for the tactless.

All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha? She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

The White House is a bully pulpit.