I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
I guess a good song is a good song is a good song, ya know.
I saw the movie Sid & Nancy. It was a pretty good movie. It didn't really make me a punk rock fan. But anything that's new, as long as it's good I enjoy it.
I mean, you could have said Elvis Presley was new wave when it happened. I heard Willy DeVille and Tom Petty and to me they were new wave really because they were new.
Rock music is stronger than sports. That's why. Rock rules. Around the world, who's more famous: Willie Mays or Paul McCartney?
My father had a couple of Mitch Miller records and a Spike Jones record, and that was it. My older brother had two or three Elvis Presley singles, and that was about it. The rest of it I did on my own.
I figured if you want to get to where John Hammond is or Billy Gibbons is or Peter Wolf is, you have to start listening to the same stuff they did, and learn from that, and that's what I did.
I had peanut butter once. It was awful.
You cannot underestimate the importance of preparation.
He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.
I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.