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.

You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.

I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general....is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in.

Any of the decisions that I made, if one could actually locate a shape or form, were all within a wall, the landscape of music.

You've got a deadline. Well, I do, too: death.

Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.

Today [people] are ready to take emergency cures, whatever they are, if it's violence, if it's a fascination with serial killing or whatever - the discomfort is so intense. Maybe it's always been like that, certainly it is now.