Music kept me off the streets and out of trouble and gave me something that was mine that no one could take away from me. Music education and families are dealing with the economic times, and I wanted to help them. If I can help a kid discover a liking, or even a passion for music in their life, then that's a wonderful thing.

It's always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you're the same, and they hate you if you're different.

Sometimes I just want to lick David Lee Roth in the nuts

I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids!

Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.

Before the operation on my left hand I wasn't able to stretch my fingers open all the way. I've never had very big hands, but I could do the splits with them. Eventually I couldn't any more. I had a twisted tendon in my little finger that prevented me from being able to stretch.

A guitar is just theoretically built wrong. Each string is an interval of fourths, and then the B string is off. Theoretically, that's not right, all the strings should be off.