Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.

I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.

I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.

I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.

I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.

I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

STATISTICSPack of Lucky Strikes.A lottery ticket

What a waste it is to lose one's mind.Or not to have a mind. How true that is.

My dad remembers being in school with my uncle, and the teacher would say outright to the class that the Japanese were second-class citizens and shouldn't be trusted.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Praise day at night, and life at the end.

True Yankees fans know an up-and-coming player when they see one.

You can have anything you want, providing you first let go of wanting it.

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

Even one hair has a shadow.

Being a leading man... that's like saying I want to be astronaut. That's not going to happen.