People got extremely comfortable with being able to turn on their television and see MTV say, "This guy's hot you should buy this record."

I would like to believe that people knew what they were fighting for and why they wanted a revolution, and exactly what it was within that they didn't like.

There were lots of nightly relationships. But the reason you don't want to make a commitment is not that you're such a freewheeling, adventurous person, it's because you're scared shitless that it will turn out like your mother and father.

[While] my life started taking on all the problems of addiction. So that took me off into an area where relationships were absolutely impossible to handle on any real level. . . . Even communicating with other people was impossible.

I think I quite desperately wanted to have that kind of special companionship [like marriage ] . . . a special relationship, yet I hid from it for many, many years and pretended to be cynical about it.

By the mid-'80s, it was really apparent to me that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can't even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.