For me, I was somebody who was a smart young guy who didn't do very well in school. The basic system of education, I didn't fit in; my intelligence was elsewhere.

I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads. Erica Jong To Cowardly Lion:"As for you my fine friend, you are a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You're confusing courage with wisdom.Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz "Courage faces fear and thereby masters it."Martin Luther King, Jr. "These days I'm feeling all right'cept I can't tell my courage from my desperation

Your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts, may the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.

If you don't connect yourself to your family and to the world in some fashion, through your job or whatever it is you do, you feel like you're disappearing, you feel like you're fading away, you know? I felt like that for a very very long time. Growing up, I felt like that a lot. I was just invisible; an invisible person. I think that feeling, wherever it appears, and I grew up around people who felt that way, it's an enormous source of pain; the struggle to make yourself felt and visible. To have some impact, and to create meaning for yourself, and for the people you come in touch with.

When I first started in rock, I had a big guy's audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid '80s.

Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.