I'm the band leader. That's not to say that the other people are my minions - they all put in a tremendous amount of personality, and push the music in ways I would never expect.

I am definitely less and less interested in music made by people that exist today, people that are living. I just see them as part of the whole stupid process of the music business, desperate (even if they feign indifference) to get noticed, trying to "make it" in the stinking music business, to become "famous" etc, and it disgusts me.

Maybe in the future I'll put out someone's one-off project, but generally I don't have time.

I'm pretty confident that people are going to come along for the ride. If they don't, tough.

Playing an old record doesn't interest me at all. It's exactly the opposite of what I want to do.

I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.

When I first started doing the quieter, more acoustic material in Swans, there was a lot of derision and outright hatred from the audience and press, just as in the early days of Swans when we were rejected outright because of the bludgeoning, single-minded violence of the music.