I couldn't do rap. I was trying. I don't know how. I'm not good enough to know.

I got tired of the Ramones around the time I quit and I really got into rap. I thought it was the new punk rock. LL Cool J was my biggest idol.

Because I'm quiet, people think I'm really cold, or rude, or snobby. But I'm literally scared to talk to them.

Metallica - they're so demonic, they're crazy, I don't know how they do it.

I think the Internet shortens the distance between people, and that can often lead to inappropriateness.

I've always admired people with really strong presences and felt that caring about the visual component of what you do is not intrinsically superficial or vain.

I've always liked extreme performers; I don't think I am one, but my mentality is in line with that.

Visuals are as artistic as sounds, so being serious about both isn't a contradiction to me.

It's very hard to tour.

When I got into rap I didn't exactly win any popularity contests. I called myself Dee Dee King, after B.B. King, to the total dismay of my fellow Ramones.

When I met Ronnie Spector, she walked in and said, 'You look like me.'

I love my wife to death. I mean my ex-wife.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.

In Los Angeles, they don't want you to fail, they want you to die.

the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

I can't seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good.

Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.

Once upon a time, a girl lived in a sandcastle, making monsters to send through a hole in the sky.

I don't expect anybody to know who I am.