My mom. She really encouraged me. That's the trouble with education: Unless you have a really supportive parent, you get left behind.

Music can make the cerebral accessible, the subconscious hummable. It communicates our shared needs and desires as sentient beings better than any other medium.

I think there are nice things about every era. I wish we could just take the nice things.

I'm glad I got a record contract, because all of a sudden everything you were doing before that made you a stupid person now makes you a smart person.

Precocious and eccentric are okay. But I think that people in the arts represent something integral and kind of secretive in everybody else. So the reason people like some artists is because they're saying or doing something that they would like to do or say, but they don't have the balls or the means. People are really afraid to put their ass on the line. Just to put your face on a poster and put your name in big print and say "Come see me," that takes some cojones, you know? Ambition is nothing to be ashamed of.

The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.

I'd been knocking on record companies' doors for so long, and I had gone on a lot of auditions. It's weird when you go to those auditions through the Village Voice or something. You never know what to expect. You just press Floor 3 on the elevator and pray that it's not... You know, anyone can place an ad, so it's really freaky.