It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.

America was built on an attempted genocide, anyway. Guns were completely necessary.

[Kenneth Koch] taught children in public schools in New York City to write poems and told them down worry about rhyming, don't worry about any of that stuff. You know, write a poem where you mention three colors and make it five lines - or he would just give them, you know, little strategies. And, man, they wrote some great poems.

In Hollywood Westerns even in the Thirties and Forties, history was mythologized to accommodate some kind of moral code. And what really affects me deeply is when you see it taken to the extent where Native Americans become mythical people.

Separate two particles, place them at opposite ends of the universe, produce some effect in one, and the other will be identically affected.

I'm not putting down anyone that does look at their work in that way, but for me I am a hardcore amateur.

You can define everything as being political and analyze it politically.