Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it

I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way.

Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.

My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well.

I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.

That's what we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different.

It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God...The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.