“Like with New Bums and Donovan Quinn, he is seriously one of the greatest songwriters in terms of words that is alive right now. So I really wanted to play with him to experience that, to play music with these really great words.”

Probably the art, in that a lot of the people who I want to collaborate with can do something that I can’t do.

For me Henry Corbin, the way that he writes about certain esoteric matters, is in a phenomenological way that refuses a New Age lens. But at the same time he’s very much responsible for a lot of New Age thought, because he was a very syncretic thinker.

That’s how I always try to start my thoughts. I write them down first, eventually it turns into a poem, and if I feel like composing something to it, then I do that.

I want people to say at the end of my day, you know, like I used to say about Sidney Poitier and James Cagney and Joan Crawford and Red Skelton and those guys and Bill Cosby. They did quality and substance. You always remember them.

If I feel like something’s gonna be right, I invest in it, whatever it is.

Whatever success I’ve had, I always like to top it.

Like all being in love, as distinct from particular acts of loving, it is a first principle. So far from resulting from our knowledge and choice.

Tranquility is like quicksilver. The harder you grab for it, the less likely you will grasp it.

I was fortunate to have parents who understood the importance of exposing their kids to different sports, different cultures and different activities in order to discover what we liked and what we didn’t like. They didn’t push us, they just gave us many things to choose from.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like.