Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

I always like junkyards. All this metal piled up - they're filled with pathos, those places. Much more pathos than most of the music I've heard. You look at it, and there's more feeling, even though it's depressing, than there is in a lot of music I hear these days. A junkyard is what it is, whereas listening to a record by, say, Styx, is something else.

Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt.

I don't see us as a big media gimmick band. We don't have a cultivated appearance or anything like Kiss.

When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.