A lot of my friends who grew up in Manhattan have a strange phobia about Brooklyn. It's big and scary and they get lost.

I have nothing against bombastic music, but when it comes to making albums, I'd prefer to make music that has a sort of vulnerable subtlety to it.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

Whether the Virgin Mary existed, I don't know. But the human need for her to appear in tortilla, that's what inspires my interest.

For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer.

I'm a weird, bald musician who makes records in his bedroom and lives in the Lower East Side.

In 1991 I did an interview wherein I described myself as a 'teetotal Christian,' which was an exaggeration, although I do like tea and Christ.