Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

The performances in the future would be like an audience wired to somebody who was sort of instigating, and then moment-to-moment creation would be transmuted individually.

Listening. That's what music is about. You hear it. And I'd listen to it and something would move me one way or another; and I would try and play it.

every mind is at least as heavy as mine

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.