The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.

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.

People often can't separate, or can't understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it's a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there's a deep anxiety going on.

Rock music is the province of the young, and it should be made by young people. I'm not running around in a pair of spandex tights trying to reclaim my youth.

Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That's terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.

My muse is my wife. It's not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.