There are famous examples of people who just had really strange ways - [Jimi] Hendrix being the biggest example of that. Or someone like Keith Richards, he just has a really idiosyncratic style.

It’s important to me that people hear my music on its own merit and not in relation to another project I’ve done. Ultimately, the music has its own energy and message and stands on its own.

Most of my favourite guitarists are self-taught, because in a way there's less of a reverence for the instrument itself, so you end up finding and inventing however you want to play it.

In a way it's the emotional feeling that you get in a good rock song or folk song, there's just nothing that rivals that.

American politics are important because it affects the entire world in often negative ways.

A great painting is something that you can come back to again and again.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too?

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

The high stakes test culture runs almost totally counter to what we know about how people learn. It causes us to engage in professional malpractice on a regular basis.

New situations inspire new thoughts. Here is the benefit of travelling, much more than in mere sight-seeing. We lose ourselves in the streets of our own city, and go abroad to find ourselves.

I hate these questions - I don't like talking about this stuff [popular culture], because it's so... to me, it's so ordinary.

Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.

If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.

Martin O'Neill rules with a rod of fear.

Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism.

In the discharge of duties my guide will be the Constitution, which I this day swear to preserve, protect, and defend.