Live for yourself... there's no one else more worth living for...
Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song.
If you've got a problem, take it out on a drum.
Howard Roark stood as a role model for me - as exactly the way I already was living. Even at that tender age [18] I already felt that. And it was intuitive or instinctive or inbred stubbornness or whatever; but I had already made those choices and suffered for them.
It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later.
I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.