The average is the borderline that keeps mere men in their place. Those who step over the line are heroes by the very act. Go.

All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it.

Russia is tough. The history, the land, the people - brutal.

When you're holding people's attention, I feel you must give them high-quality ingredients. They deserve nothing but your best. And if they need information, get it, cross-check it, and try to be right. Do not waste their time; do not enjoy the ego trip of being onstage.

I'm not a young man, and I can find intensity in a lot of different ways, sometimes without even raising my voice. When I was younger, it was all about how I need three extra sets of lungs to get enough wind to get out the thing at the screaming level I need to, because that's the way it needs to be. Now, I see that there's a whole lot of other colors on the palette.

We're just very belligerent, and I'm not trying to put Americans down, by and large I think we're nice people, but we operate with the information we're given and we are limited by the ignorance that is kind of injected into the media and into the TV shows.

Politics is a thing that I follow because it determines what is going on in my country, but I vote and deal with politicians with a great degree of jaundiced eye.