My advice for young people is that, if you want to be a musician, the thing to do is practice eight hours a day.

The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.

[Bob] Dylan began to incorporate things into that scene that were controversial then. He got shouted at in Newport when he played electric guitar, for instance. There was a certain purity that was sought among those people.

I'm not stupid enough to want to be famous. But I would like to be able to earn a living playing music.

My original idea was to produce and not make records myself.

We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.

The record business is dangerous to the health of bands and individuals, which is something I'm just now learning. But it's not dangerous in any of the ways people think; it's not that they try to make you compromise your art. That's not the problem.