Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.