Everything I do, writing, touring, travelling, it all comes from the punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression - from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go. Make some sense of it.

You want to meet a bunch of really friendly people? Go to a Slayer concert. There'll be some real psychos there, but most of those people will take care of each other.

I've been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, 'Hey, this war is bogus,' to some guy who's 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

If you want to believe that humans walked with dinosaurs and the planet is a few thousand years old, that is absolutely fine with me. If you want to teach this to your kids, I don't care. If states want to teach creationism in their schools, there is nothing I can do about it, so I don't sweat it.

There's nothing funny about, 'Yeah, I took a First Class plane ticket and I went to some designer beach and made out with a Laotian slave girl.' Who cares?

All my big heroes are literary, writers.

People who keep a large snake in their apartment building, which happens quite a bit, all of a sudden, within two summers, have a 14-foot animal that's eating adult rabbits, and needs quite a bit of room and quite a bit of heat. That's the animal that gets put in the back of a pick-up truck and dumped into the Florida Everglades or the city lake, or just left on a doorstep - again, it's quite often the animal that suffers.