There are real teachers out there; I don't pretend to have their mantle.

I'm sort of a cavedweller: I miss my house, my yard, my kitchen, my wife. The trees. When I get home, I like to get down into my office neighborhood as soon as I can.

Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday and you're 17 years old.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

If you're standing in the middle of a ring and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.

I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.