“In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song.”

Jealousy we understood and thought natural–a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us.

I’ve noticed that when people are joking they’re usually dead serious, and when they’re serious, they’re usually pretty funny.

What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister?

Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.

This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.

The best songs just come unasked for. You don’t have to think about them. Summer is a good time for songs.

Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain.

There are things known and things unknown and in between are The Doors.

Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.

Getting drunk . . . you’re in complete control up to a point. It’s your choice, every time you take a sip.

No one thought up being. He who thinks he has, step forward.

Windows work two ways, mirrors one way. You never walk through mirrors or swim through windows.

You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren’t willing to do that.

Where’s your will to be weird?

I think ultimately what you really want is a few people within any label that are into the band enough to really work on it every day for a long time and to actually try a little bit.

And for the moment the whole burden of the war rested on the few hundred German fighter pilots on the Channel coast.

As interceptors. And out of this fifty, there were never more than 25 operational. So we had only a very, very few.

Makes almost everybody uncomfortable, and a few, extraordinarily rich.

I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my ‘Creative Projects’ folder

There are only a few genres, horror and comedy, where you can get that immediate feedback from the audience.

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.

The guys I grew up with, my cinematic heroes, have always been men of few words, but of action. Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach.