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."

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.

I don't think anybody does anything anymore without commenting on why they're doing it or making fun of it as they're doing it.

Only cool people care about the origin stories of why they like something, and I'm not cool.

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

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.

The things that I have loved have always been those extremes where there has been some kind of apocalypse in the person's life, and they come out unscathed or scathed.