“Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible – it wasn’t an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.”

The music business is a weird business. Sometimes licensing doesn’t happen because some business component that you never knew about stops it.

The piano is just a different animal. It’s expensive, it’s big, it’s heavy, and it doesn’t fit in the mix easily.

If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I’m sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don’t do that, I’ve hamstrung the melody.

I think a lot of good directors listen to music while they’re working. The songs just don’t become a part of the film. They’re replaced.

The nature of honesty is that if someone has information or knows something about you that you don’t want heard, then they have power over you.

My parents told me I must get married. I was seen as a failure if I didn’t do it.

I think people use temp music quite a bit, but the people who write the temp music don’t ever really learn that their music was inspiring a movie.

And all I really want to say is you’re the reason I want to stay.

When someone really goes to tell you something about what they’re thinking, they’re going to wear that experience with them. That’s what you have to share.

I do have that mindset – that most good art comes from some turmoil, from someone trying to come to some equilibrium, or come up and get a breath.

I drink a lot, probably too much. My scene while writing lyrics is always a bottle of scotch and stacks of note cards, pencil and pencil sharpener. I throw around note cards and drink.

People aren’t going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They’d rather just have the martini.

Everything I write is personal, really. Even when I’m sarcastic, it’s quite personal. And on this record, from the production to the singing to the performances, I got it really honest.

If I’m in a relationship and my girlfriend is sleeping with other people, I don’t need to know who it is; I just want to know how she feels about it.

I start songs all the time. If I weren’t so lazy, I would finish them. It’s like when I have a deadline I have to.

I divorce myself from listeners who aren’t tolerant of humor. I did notice universally that, especially when it comes to weight, people look in the mirror and get the angle just right, tell themselves it’s all right, and then they go out.

They do everything from gangsta rap to polka music and every genre in between. It’s amazing.

I’ll bet every great thinker and leader we’ve got Could see all kinds of things other people could not!

You grow up real quick, a half-Mexican in a sailor’s suit, because I’d be riding the streetcar to school everyday.

In the ’80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear – that if I didn’t, people would soon forget about me.

Almost every cartoonist, when he’s sitting down to draw a funny face.

I probably write a poem every 50 years.

The place that I worked I used to joke about it. There was a, every morning at 10:30 I’d come into work and I’d go into this cubicle that had a little upright piano and fake white cork bricks on the wall.

We need a war every 10 years, so we can stay match fit in case the Germans try again.