“If you listen to really deep ambient records that don’t move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.”

Somehow, stars have a lot of class if they are done right; they never have a shelf life.

They’ve asked me to do this temporarily. I don’t know what temporarily means. Life is temporary.

Once you realize there is life after mistakes, you gain a self-confidence that never goes away.

The only people helped by the death tax are lawyers, accountants, and IRS agents.

We are all drifting reefwards now, and faith is our only anchor.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love, and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.

My dad was a dentist but I wasn’t a hygienist. I assisted my dad.

There’s fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be.

The first thing the federal government can do to help is get out of the way.

The revolution has been dubbed “The Orange Revolution,” orange being the campaign color of Viktor Yushchenko. The demonstrators say they are tired of living under a corrupt government…

I would love to see the French spending money to restore Iraq.

The government’s view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn’t want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.

Nowadays I’m not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It’s part of our culture, like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays – beyond their meaning – a factor in our economy.

The recent history of Ukraine is replete with dead journalists, beaten journalists, news agencies being shut down, and politicians being injured or killed. Most are killed in mysterious auto accidents.

And as a result, I guess I’m just kind of a rubberneck. I’m kind of a – someone who likes to see things and likes to see these events and talk to the people who make them happen. But I don’t think journalists are as important as the people they cover.

For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.

I always listen to what I can leave out.

I can’t listen to so much music at the same time. I think you really have to have a diet. You’re just processing too much, there’s no place to put it. If you go a long time without hearing music, then you hear music that nobody else hears.

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that’s too bad.