I've had a lot of things rendered as not being effective or as some indication of my lack of sanity, only to be praised ten, fifteen, twenty years later for what I did once in this overt consciousness.

I was playing heavy metal when I was 18. I had to evolve out of that into an alternative consciousness about what it meant to change the way I played guitar, and the kind of songs, and the subject matter, and singing about child abuse, and all this stuff. I had to come from somewhere, and I had to take chances to do that.

If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.

I had such a big mouth for so long that it doesn't faze anybody anymore.

James, that's a bad situation. I'm not saying it's not repairable, but it's pretty far. When you go from being in one of the best bands in the world to some cover band... as far as I'm concerned, he was playing down at the pub.

And the world so hard to understand is the world you can't live without.

I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.