“Something gets lost when you translate. It’s hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.”

I’m selling more records on my own than I did on major labels.

At a major label you can start to feel that you’re working for them, and that any work you do, you’re never going to see any benefit.

It’s funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can’t even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

It’s not easy in this phosphorescent gloom telling waking dreams apart anyhow.

It’s more important for me to have a good record with good music and be part of a movie that’s good and where the music is used in a really great way. That’s the important thing. The other stuff you want to say about it, I don’t care.

I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.

I suppose I should be happy to be misread; better be that than some of the other things I have become.

But I can’t confront the doubts I have. I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad, and so, for the sake of momentum I’m condemning the future to death so it can match the past.

All the perfect drugs and superheroes wouldn’t be enough to bring me back to zero.

It’s easier to describe that shame, that horrible feeling of not being able to control your own life.

For me, there’s a fine line between telling a story that’s fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it’s bloodless, a little too fictional.

Clearly in this business you have to contend with a lot of that.

Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It’s uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.

You know what, the drummer is my manager. He’s busy. And I’m busy. I don’t need the dough, though. But having said that, there’s a limit to how much bad music I wanna play.

In the ’70s, everybody thought drugs were just good times. People didn’t really know about drug addiction, or that such a thing existed.

I don’t envy anybody trying to start a career right. There really is no music business left, in a lot of ways.

It always feels good to put something you’re proud of out in the world.

Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.

It is not a sacrifice, it’s a choice. If you choose to do something, then you shouldn’t say it’s a sacrifice, because nobody forced you to do it

Mass communication–wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued–presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)

When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

Do we need to have a female Bond? Couldn’t we just make something new?