“I was only in the public eye because I was annoying. You know how neurotic people may ask for one thing when they may really want another thing? It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn’t really want attention.”

I’m obsessed with five different things a day. It’s like lightbulbs in a Christmas light chain.

I think people are intimidated by me, and I don’t know why. Sometimes even my own bandmates can be intimidated, or irritated, by me.

Usually I’m not really conscious of what’s going on. I don’t have a lot of memories onstage. At all.

Musicians and artists are not… it’s not like politicians or something where you can’t really affect them.

Audiences tend to dig the earlier stuff by any given musician, and the artists themselves always tend to prefer the thing that they’re doing now.

I think the younger kids need to realize there’s this whole forgotten 90s that people don’t really talk about.

I like my solitude, and I’m a strong-willed person; I’m a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.

I’m not the guy in the dress with the blood and the unrequited gay whatever – which, according to my psychiatrist, my gayness is a form of narcissism but you’ll have to ask him about that.

I don’t have anything to prove.

You’re always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that’s maybe even too weird for your own taste.

Everybody just needs to realize that when you write something you’re just in one mood. I was told I needed to write it and it was overdue; I don’t even remember what day it was.

I’m glad to play for them. But I’d rather play for an audience where half of them were not into it than one where all of them were pretending to be into it, for fear of being uncultured.

I’ve always wanted to learn how to paint, too. I’d like to try everything, but music is my reason for living.

And then you realize that your friends – your real-life friends – it’s not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you’re doing than how you’re doing.

It’s just different today. Nobody seems to last too long these days. I wouldn’t know how to get started today.

I don’t have the capacity to write stuff consciously. When I do, it’s really awful.

A good-looking piece of scenery anywhere delights the eye and elevates the spirits. Some of us, crude creatures that we are, are merely excited; finer souls draw ethical and spiritual nutrients from the sight.

I don’t know if steroids are going to help you in baseball. I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe steroids can help eye-hand coordination and technically hit a baseball.

I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.

DO IT RIGHT, DO IT WRONG, BUT DO IT. Squeeze your eyes shut and jump. Because a wonderful thing happens then. Your focus shifts from yourself, your nervousness, and your imagined inadequacies to the task at hand.

An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes.

The world’s equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order. Mankind’s ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System – the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed.

This is the moral challenge of our generation. Not only are the eyes of the world upon us. More important, succeeding generations depend on us. We cannot rob our children of their future.

When he gets mad, it’s like he’s in another world. He’ll look at you with those big eyes and they’ll be going around in circles.