My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.

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.

All people have is hope. That's what brings the next day and whatever that day may bring... A hope grounded in the real world of living, friendship, work, family...

When I was young I was very shy and that was my personality. I was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety.

Politics and life go hand in hand.

They put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the Yellow man.

The wonderful thing about rock music is even if you hate the other person, sometimes you need him more, you know. In other words if he's the guy that made that sound, he's the guy that made that sound, and without that guy making that sound, you don't have a band, you know.