“Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ.”

Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He’s not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.

I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.

I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.

The very funny thing about “Like A Rolling Stone” is it was a six minute song, there was no music to read from. And there I was playing this unfamiliar instrument.

The “Highway 61” album [of Bob Dylan] was produced by Bob Johnston if I’m not incorrect. And Bob Johnston was an entirely different producer than Tom Wilson.

So I would come in on the upbeat of one. I would wait until the band played the chord, and then as quickly as I could come in play the chord.

I mean just out and out crooks. And the next generation had a little more finesse. But I mean those first wave of people, you know, definitely would take all your money, no doubt about it.

Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before.

Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.

Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.

I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after “Like A Rolling Stone”.

And a little slate that came out of the wall that you could actually write on. And a door that locked from the outside.

Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.

The [Bob] Dylan sessions were very disorganized, to say the least. I mean, the “Like A Rolling Stone” session I was invited by the producer to watch.

Only through sheer ambition did I end up playing on [Bob Dylan sessions] and the fact that I could do that is a testament to how disorganized it really was.

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.

The difference lies in the intention behind wanting money. Your reasons for why you want to create more money is typically why you’re ambitious to get it. You’re either genuinely ambitious or selfishly hungry.

True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

I was an ambitious child and I tended to be scatterbrained. If I was at school and saw a bird outside the window I wanted to follow it. I was adventurous.

In a couple, sometimes, one or both people have to give up their personal life, dreams and ambitions for the good of the family.

I don’t know if I was as ambitious as to change the world, but I do feel like – the reason why I called the album “Our Version of Events” was that I feel a lot of people are not represented in pop music and popular culture.

I’m always gonna do my own thing. I wanna be something – whether I’m 19 years old working at a pet store, or I’m 19 years old with a No. 1 record – I wanna be the biggest I can be to my crowd, no matter what my crowd is.