You make your work and you can't ask for approval when you're doing it. Otherwise, it's going to be untruthful in some way.

Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.

The sexuality of children - there's a lot friction there. That tension interests me a lot.

The goal is ecstasy, but I don't want to make some sort of saccharine pop music. I want to make something that's completely uncompromising: the best possible music ever made.

The music takes you. It has to be alive. It's like you hammer something, and the way it happens to bleed leads you into new directions.

I don't want to sound like everybody else.

I like loud electric guitars because I like how you can just lose your entire being in the sound.

I'm the band leader. That's not to say that the other people are my minions - they all put in a tremendous amount of personality, and push the music in ways I would never expect.

I used to routinely break my ribs doing stupid things onstage, but I have a healthy fear of breaking my bones now.

I'm pretty confident that people are going to come along for the ride. If they don't, tough.

Making those CDs, signing them, numbering them, packing them. It takes hundreds of hours, but it's worth it because I'm able to do the thing I love.

To intentionally pass on opportunity is to intentionally pass on living.

Every now and then I sit and watch the sun rise to remind myself how it's done—peacefully, steadily, warmly, and in beautiful color.

Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow.

I am ready to be alone.

It's about the quality of the worry," I said. "I have happier worries now than I used to.

I'm not blockbuster boy.

Luck is luck ... What we do with it determines whether it's good or bad.

It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining.

It is a characteristic of the human mind to hate the man one has injured.

If the perpetrators of the World Trade Center plane crashes had a nuclear weapon, there's no doubt in my mind but that they would've detonated it in New York.