I read somewhere that if you translated all the gadgets and technology in our houses to make our lives easier and save time, each of us would have the equivalent of 300 slaves, in Roman times. We have these incredible luxuries, incredible power and privileges, but we seem to be squandering them on little plastic spoons to stir our coffee with, that'll last two seconds in our lives.

Actually, time and time again people always come back to my early, more innocent stuff, and say, "I kind of prefer that." I could go back to writing that and probably make more people happy, but it just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. I don't want to take the lazy route.

I always talk about my ambition with music, and it's to sort of seduce people into listening to sounds they wouldn't normally listen to or want to hear.

As never before does the keeping of our economic machine in tune depend upon wise policies in the administrative side of the government.

Chaos is hateful. That indeterminate nature of war brings a really unsettling atmosphere to life.

The more you look into pigs the more you realize quite how everywhere they are. People come in contact with parts of pigs probably between 20 and 50 times a day. And that's before you even eat your dinner. And yet we just have a long string of negative words about them.

You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.