I get letters from young people telling me that they're broke and download my albums for free. They ask me what I think about that. I now have a standard line. I tell them, 'I would rather be heard than paid.'

All by yourself, unable to express the pain of your distress with your deeper inside. You alienate yourself and everybody else.

Most of the writers I like just intimidate and humble me but in that there's a good deal of inspiration to be had as well.

Technically speaking, there is no music whatsoever on a CD. Lots of information, but no music.

Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind.

The visceral nature of hard rock music, the fact that you can have this sledge hammering sound - and that you can hook a lyric up and a feeling up to something and make the lyric jump into this machine that crushes. That has always been really attractive to me, that kind of power.

I think Naomi Klein was very astute with her book 'Shock Doctrine.' We make money on disaster.