“I quit college. I was studying architecture for about a year.”

You’re going to have more rejection than acceptance.

Who put the bomp in the bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp, who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong?

You’ve got to really be able to accept the rejection.

A guitar riff played on a piano doesn’t come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.

I think if one wants to be in a continual state of insanity one should stay married to that writing partner.

We became the songs we wrote.

One other thing, if it’s possible, as songwriters, you should also develop yourself as record producers.

There’s so much fear involved in trying to do something you don’t know how to do that drugs and alcohol can become a big part of your life if you have an addictive personality or are very unsure, which most songwriters are.

I think that most writers who wait until they’re inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.

I get a different kind of lyric from someone else that might make me go in a different musical direction.

I also used to work in the Catskill Mountains as a bus boy, and I performed in talent shows.

It’s amazing how a competitive nature can turn a negative into something positive.

It’s very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there’s no creative crop to harvest.

You have to be very brave in that first writing session.

Probably most successful songwriters have an innate songwriting ability.

No matter what you do, you’ll never run away from you.

We sailed to Italy on the Andrea Doria, a year before it sank, and Zoot (Sims) and I played a lot of ping-pong on deck during that trip.

But the imposition of morality onto science, – where it does not belong – has become rampant in recent years.

We’d won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren’t going to win.

I lost a very dear friend who lived with AIDS for about 17 years. Rejecting early treatments that were iffy, he thought he saved himself. I really miss him a lot.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

Martina and I went through a very bad five years. Everything’s very good between us now, but it was a long haul.

During the first 10 years of my life, while my parents were married, I enjoyed a privileged upbringing. After their divorce, my life was difficult.

It is defeat that lives on and takes the years to smother.