Writing should be like skirts. Long enough to cover what it needs to cover and short enough to maintain interest.

[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.

With my stuff, I think I've tried. I've been courted. I don't want to sound like an asshole, but I've been courted to be someone who could sell a lot of books.

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.

You can write songs about your comic books and the girl or boy you sort of know and your mom and dad and it's all right there in front of you.

The only hope we have are our bodies. We're all trapped in them and we all hate them, and it's this reason why we're comic and not tragic.

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.