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

I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.

All the Frank O'Hara types seem to have very little sound stuff going... it's so chatty or something.

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.

Johnny Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago. Back then, when people got up in the morning, they knew what they had to do to get through the day - there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores, what job to take, what work to do. But not Johnny. For him, it's all right there - it's a freer state, and that's what my music is looking for... ... To understand Johnny, you should think of William Blake. He was the same kinda guy.

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

I've got a quote for you, a good quote to describe Television...In madness there is order.