He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren't going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.

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

I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That's no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

I'm neither left or right. I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen.

Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm