Personally, being somewhat envious of Richard's (Thompson) songwriting and guitar playing, it's somewhat satisfying he's not yet achieved household-name status. It serves him right for being so good.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy‚ but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat‚ and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune.

There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

The idea of making music from an imaginary culture was to give ourselves a set of restrictions and parameters within which to work. Otherwise, we might have just gone on all kinds of creative detours, some of which might have been interesting. But better we confine ourselves to something.

People in Latin America... love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.