Amy Winehouse was not a person I ever met, and I can't say that I am overly conversant in all of her music. I do have her albums, and years ago, when I first heard her sing, I thought she was extraordinary. The tone of her voice, her phrasing, her raw appearance - these qualities were extremely captivating to me.

The government is a functionary of the corporations - and there's nothing new about that. You can find people in the 1930s talking about the army basically working for Wall Street in all of these countries [it invades].

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

To see change in your own area code is very powerful. There's a little orphanage down the street from my company, and we donate $1 from the sale of each CD we sell to the orphanage.

Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.

Now, if someone wants to spit on me, I just roll up the window of my BMW 540i.