Punk-rock gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun.

Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that.

August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor.

I'm usually busy - if you call me at the house, I get about four phone calls there a year - I'm usually running around the house with a pen in my mouth holding onto something, folding it, or doing something to it, and it's always a bad time.

If I hear, 'Be afraid of Tehran,' I'm like, 'I'd better go to Tehran.'

Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.

A man came up to me the other day and said he hadn't had a bite in weeks. So you know what I did? I walked by him like he didn't even exist.