My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca.

Anyone who's been a heavy drinker and heavy smoker and has the good future to survive that and give it up knows what a very different kind of daily existence one has. I was smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. And I was drinking heavily on tours.

Maybe we, the cultural workers , could apply ourselves. We're not going to resolve it in this moment or even in this generation, but perhaps as some kind of agenda we could invite our writers and cultural workers to address the problem a little more responsibly, because people are suffering tremendously from a want of data.

Does anybody have a cigarette? I'm looking forward to that first smoke. I've been looking forward to [it] for about 30 years.

Some people, it [songwriting] comes faster. Some people, it comes slower.

When you're younger, you do have that thing that you were talking about where the mouth goes dry. I mean you have reactions, and you do fall in love.

Part of the shabbiness of our culture, if indeed it is shabby, is that it doesn't seem to prepare people. With all the songs about love and all the movies and all the books, there doesn't seem to be any way that we can prepare the human heart for this experience.