There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition.

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn't even stand up, let alone kick the ball.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words.

If you mean do I use the guitar when I'm sitting at home writing stuff, then basically no, never. All I would ever write would be stuff that my fingers easily fall into.

Well, I think music for kids is never anything but experimental is it?

To lose time is to lose life

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.

I'd written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.

Democrats didn't agree with policies. How do I know? Because they voted against them when they came up on the floor of the House and the Senate.

For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise - whatever appeals to you.

Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.

Music is my drug, the one thing that makes me numb.

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

Feel me now, picture my pain, embrace my words, make the world change.

Optimism is not the ability to live on the highest branch. It is the faith to learn to fly.