I don't really know what playing is. There's a way to do it correctly, but it eludes me. I think getting in front of an audience is definitely a good way to focus in on the real dimension of the activity, the most important dimension.

I would never want to kill a human being.

Musical acts that feign enthusiasm for what they're doing the guitarist who jumps up and down, like it's choreographed are so transparently vacuous.

In all the music I've done, what I'm really interested in above all else, and I'm not sure it's what one should be interested in, is the kind of - you know, people talk about work progressions, which doesn't really make sense with pop music because there is no progression, because there is no tonic, because there is no more tonality.

There's love and there's romantic love. The Greeks had different words for different kinds of love. And we just got "love." I don't know what you would call the other kinds - maybe brotherly love, Christian love, the love of Saint Francis, love of everyone and everything. Then there's romantic love, which, by and large, is a pain in the ass, a kind of trauma.

Various people have put forth that love is the scene of two, that it's not about unity, it's about two absolutely disjunct positions encountering each other. So here, even with something like sex-- what [that song's] about-- you could never become one.

It seems to me that the best work I've done - and maybe this is something other people can identify with - was because it was an end in itself. It was something other than making ends meet, it was an escape from all that.