You know, they say you can reduce genius to someone who spent 10,000 hours trying to get good at something. I'm not claiming either one of those. I haven't done anything for 10,000 hours but sleep. But you do stuff enough, you get better at it. Usually it's a simple thing like that. Essentially, a brainless endeavor.

They don't respect us, so let's surprise them, we'll drop the big one, pulverize them.

I once had dinner with Madonna and I wasn't nervous but within about a minute I found myself talking about underwear.

People become who they are. Even Beethoven became Beethoven.

I hate having to wait. I've got the thing done. I just want to see what happens.

More of my songs are intended to be funny than almost anyone else. Sometimes maybe it cheers me up a bit. I've got a distance from it. Sometimes what I'm writing is more important to me than the rest of my life. It's more important to me that I'm writing well than anything else.

What I'm most pleased about is that there's no particular decline. The songs I wrote 40 years ago are no worse and no better - there's a consistency.