Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, "Listen to this!"

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like the little-magazine writer.

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.