I think I know what my bandmates like or are interested in or would be interested in doing. I take ideas and I develop them, get rid of some ideas, keep writing, and then new things come up.

That's just the way people's brains work. If you want to talk about something, you have to reduce it to a form that can be understood. That's one of the reasons I'm not good about boiling down music.

When I joined the band I was coming largely from an improvising background, and the idea of a fluid rhythm that was really coherent attracted me.

For me, the voice expresses things that there are just no other ways to express.

I'm pretty resigned to the fact that I never hear music the way anyone else does, and I no longer find it surprising.

When I dream about music, or think about music, by myself, I try to be as free as possible and allow my creative mind full reign.

Some of my favorite music is incredibly repetitive, or on the surface has an element of repetition. But once you go beneath the surface, you realize in the repetition is constant variation.

I can talk about feelings, but I can't talk about why this chord on top of this chord sounds cool to me. It just makes me feel a certain way, and I like it.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; licence, the right to do what you like.

You must begin to think of yourself as becoming the person you want to be.

Anybody may support me when I am right. What I want is someone that will support me when I am wrong.

I do think vajazzles need to stop. The whole thing of glitter-ising your cell phone and your purse and your body needs to stop.

Now go and stake some vamps. Especially the sparkly emo ones.

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay, I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

The joy of painting lies precisely in the challenge of memory and the challenge of translation from the lived experience to the two-dimensional or three-dimensional symbol.

Women are like those blinkin' little Greek islands, places to call at but not to stay.