I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.

Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

If 'Mystery Train' is my Nixon book and 'Lipstick Traces' my Reagan book, 'Invisible Republic' is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he'd done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end.

I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits