It's weird. People want you to know that they write. They want you to know they're a musician, rather than making music or making stories. It's the strangest thing.

Fashion costs money, but songs are free. You can write them for free and you can sing them for free and they can infect those around you or the people from the future and they can sing them for free too.

There was a lot of tension between my dad and his mother and brothers. Sometimes when I was over there, I remember thinking, "I don't want to get shot."

Most of the answers to the world could be answered with our bodies.

[He Stopped Loving Her Today] is all about the experience of being alive and the thought process of consciousness, and then you have these polemical essay-type things going on for a couple decades now. Some of these music books are where you're going to see an anecdote of a person behaving without some kind of commentary.

Everybody is so goddamn sure of themselves, it just makes you realize this is the curse of the modern world.

This [Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original] is another one of those books with the perfect blend of anecdote and analysis. The analysis is built into the anecdote. It has that right feel about it. It's not too scholarly, either.