I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.

I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious.

Music is about imagination. It's about thought. It's about creating something from nothing.

I want the music to be ambiguous. Its tone gives you a context in which to start visualizing what you're feeling with the music.

It's a mysterious thing that a whole generation of young people can come up and see and understand things that previous generations weren't able to see or understand.

One hundred guitarists making lots of noise would not be something you'd want to listen to.

I'm never happy with anything.

It's crucial that people are on the right measure at the right time.

Whatever works for the piece I'm thinking about is the way I write.

I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.

I liked rock music going back to the '60s, but I never ever had any desire to be a rock musician and when I started doing a band it was experimental music.

The world is a contradiction

Without adversity, we will fail to exercise our faith.

…The more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader.

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

We have to go in places no body would ever think of going into were it not for the necessities of war.

Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.

When we took over the economy, we were losing 800 thousand jobs a month under the [George W.] Bush administration.

Nowadays, with history not being taught anymore in American public schools, self-esteem is taking its place.

Congress is like first grade, only not as well behaved.